Today -100: April 11, 1914: Enter the Dolphin

In Tampico, Mexico, which is the rebels’ next target, a Federal colonel orders the crew of the USS Dolphin, which had stopped to refuel, arrested, basically for being in a war zone in uniform and unable to explain in Spanish what they were doing with those oil drums. [Note: the article refers to the Dolphin as a whaleboat, which refers to the shape of the ship; it’s not a whaler]. They are quickly released, and the port commander apologizes to the American commander of US forces in Tampico, who is named Admiral Mayo because of course he is. Admiral Mayo is just happy to let this little misunderstanding blow over... oh, of course he isn’t. He demands a formal apology, the arrest of the Mexican colonel responsible for the incident, and a 21-gun salute, within 24 hours or else. Mayo has been sending both sides warnings that their little fight had better not damage any oil equipment in Tampico.

One of the towns that voted itself dry in the elections Tuesday was Minooka, Illinois. As a result, the town has had to return the license money already paid by saloons, and is now broke. It will have to turn off its street lights and fire its three cops and the city attorney.

People who are against women’s suffrage: 1) Helen Taft, wife of the former president, who has joined an anti-suffrage organization. 2) Archbishop Moeller of Cincinnati, who thinks it would “bring women into a sphere of activities that is not in accord with their retiring modesty, maidenly dignity and refinement. We fear that suffragette women will cease to be the queens of the home.”

In Italy, Baron Dominico Camarda is arrested for having imprisoned his sisters Isobel and Teresina in his castle’s dungeon 18 years ago. Isobel has gone insane, and Teresina died 3 years ago. Evidently they disgraced the family.

The Paris prefect of police bans a prize fight between two women.

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Today -100: April 10, 1914: Cigars vs. dirigible, the battle of the phallic symbols

A suffragette smashes a porcelain saucer in the British Museum, because justice.

Headline of the Day -100: “Cigar Wrecks a Dirigible.” An Italian military airship, built by public subscription, landed due to motor damage. A crowd gathered, and some moron ignored warnings against lighting the aforementioned cigar.

German sailors are laughing at the US Navy: German sailors can drink as much beer aboard ship as they like, officers as much of any kind of booze.

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Today -100: April 9, 1914: Of friendly expressions of regret, deportations, and airplanes

The US and Colombia sign a treaty to put to rest all that unpleasantness over the former’s role in splitting off a bit of the latter in order to build a canal through it. The US will pay a $25 million indemnity and make a “friendly expression of regret” for the role Roosevelt never admitted having taken in the Panamanian revolt. (Spoiler alert: Republicans will torpedo this treaty, although Harding will negotiate a similar one, with the $25 million but without the regret.)

The NYT says the Illinois elections show that women don’t vote as a bloc.

Pancho Villa seizes the largest banks in Torreón. The banks had already removed their money, so he’s basically seized some buildings and furniture. Villa is also deporting Spaniards, 700 of whom arrive in El Paso. Carranza, who some looked to to rein Villa in, fully backs the deportations.

Today’s aviation deaths: 1) A sergeant in Britain’s Army Flying Corps attempted a sharp spiral descent and lost control of his plane. 2) A Belgian aviator hit bad weather and crashed. 3) And, just for a change of pace, the engine fails in a plane being flown by a French military aviator with a passenger over the Moroccan desert, but they glide safely to earth, and are then seized by Moorish rebels, tortured and hacked into pieces. As was their plane.

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Today -100: April 8, 1914: Of constitutions, more dry counties, and French marriages

The few voters who turned out for the NY special election support holding a state constitutional convention next year.

The Republican National Committee plans to reduce Southern representation at the National Convention: instead of there being two delegates from each Congressional district, districts where there are fewer than 7,500 votes for a Republican for Congress will just get one delegate.

After serving 26 days of her six-month sentence for her attack on Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, Mary Richardson is released temporarily on medical grounds under the Cat and Mouse Act. While she has been hunger-striking and has been forcibly fed, the medical grounds are actually appendicitis. She will have an operation for that in July and will then come under the general amnesty at the start of World War I, so she won’t be returning to Holloway Gaol.

Women vote in Chicago elections for the first time, but none of the 9 female candidates for city council is elected. Throughout Illinois, 16 counties vote in prohibition, although Springfield went from dry to wet. Everyone attributes this to the women’s vote, but 30 counties were already dry.

The London County Council will fire any women doctors employed by the Public Health Department if they get married.

The French supreme court rules that women do not already have the vote, that in fact women have no political rights, political responsibilities, or political privileges.

In the court hearings into the murder of Le Figaro editor Gaston Calmette, it finally comes out that Calmette acquired Joseph Caillaux’s personal letters from his ex-wife. Caillaux’s own testimony demonstrates that early 20th century French political marriages were no more romantic than, say, Newt Gingrich’s:

M. Caillaux said he had offered to Mme. Gueydan [his 1st wife] the alternative of a divorce or a reconciliation, but on condition that the letters taken from his desk be returned to them. An agreement, however, was made to burn them, which was done in the presence of his wife, himself, and his secretary.

Except her sister had already photographed the letters.

A reconciliation ensued, but later he and Mme. Gueydan were divorced.

Translation: he waited to dump her and marry his mistress until after a particularly close parliamentary election (and after she divorced her husband, of course).

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Today -100: April 7, 1914: Of home rule, plane crashes, dry counties, and workers’ rights

The Home Rule Bill passes the House of Commons, 356-276.

George Cornwallis-West’s divorce from Winston Churchill’s mother comes through, and he immediately marries famed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (as she billed herself), who will soon star in Pygmalion.

38 aviators died worldwide in plane accidents in the first three months of 1914, including 10 in France and 5 in the US. A pretty good percentage of them were military aviators.

12 Michigan counties voted on prohibition. Some of the counties went dry, some went wet, leaving the state with 34 dry counties and 49 wet ones.

John D. Rockefeller Jr tells the Congressional committee investigating the Colorado coal strike that he and his fellow mineowners would rather “lose all of their millions invested in the coal fields than that American workingmen should be deprived of the right under the Constitution to work for whom they pleased.” That John D., always thinking of the rights of others. He refers to his union-busting as an attempt to allow the miners “to have the privilege of determining the conditions under which they shall work.” However he claimed ignorance about most things related to his Colorado interests, such as whether they’ve been stocking up on machine guns and ammo, saying he left those things to his managers.

A federal judge denies the habeas corpus petition of the 3,600 Mexicans interned in Fort Bliss.

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Today -100: April 6, 1914: Of wine messes, peon traditions, tongues & ears & radium, and air power

Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels bans alcohol on naval vessels, navy yards and stations as of July 1. So no more wine mess (that’s a navy thing, not what happens to your bathroom floor when you’ve had too much wine).

Headline of the Day -100: “DRIVES SPANIARDS OUT OF TORREON; True to His Peon Traditions, Villa Orders Immediate Deportation of Hated Race.”

Latest rumor from Mexico: Zapata has captured the Bishop of Chilapa and is threatening to crucify him, on Good Friday yet, unless paid a ransom of 50,000 pesos.

Suffragettes bomb the church of St. Martin in the Fields, where I once heard a somewhat disappointing concert.

A Denver man’s tongue cancer is cured by what he calls “radium, the life-giving metal” (which also cures him of his deafness and catarrh). And an unnamed “American millionaire politician” with “schlerosis of the ear” in the form of a buzzing sound is looking into the possibility of curing it with that miracle drug radium. There really was no medical condition these people wouldn’t try radium on. I attribute the fact that the entire human race did not die of radiation poisoning in this period entirely to the small stockpiles of radium.

In a deposition in the Madame Caillaux case, French President Poincaré says that Joseph Caillaux told him that if Calmette printed his private letters, he’d kill him.

A NYT editorial praises the police for beating up IWW members.

Spanish inventor José Yglesias claims to be able to power light bulbs with electricity drawn from the air.

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Today -100: April 5, 1914: Of landgravines, Ulster coercion, women voters, other uses for human hair, and train robbers

Newly minted nation Albania’s newly minted ruler, Prince William, says he will lead troops (Albania has troops?) against ethnic Greek insurgents, who have captured the town of Koritza.

Germany officially denies the widely reported story that Kaiser Wilhelm wrote a letter to a princess (that’s what the original report said; is a landgravine a princess?) who had converted to Catholicism that he hated her religion.

Ulster Loyalists hold a huge outdoor rally in Hyde Park to protest “Ulster coercion.” The meeting, as was the custom, is invaded by suffragettes from the WSPU, which is no longer allowed to hold meetings in London parks. “General” Flora Drummond is mobbed and almost thrown into the Serpentine, then later arrested.

The LA Times reports that the only woman to vote in the recent primary in Aurora, Illinois, was a Miss Edith Scott. “She asked the reporters to say that she was neither a society girl, wealthy, nor pretty.”

Facing declining demand in the West for human hair for wigs, Hong Kong’s hair merchants have been shifting to “low-grade” hair for mattress stuffing.

Three weeks ago, Austria, worried about maintaining its army, banned emigration of men aged 17 to 36. But stopping emigration, mostly to America (although there was a certain art student who evaded conscription by moving to Munich) by people who can’t find jobs tends to lead to, you guessed it, unemployment and destitution, so now they’ve had to ease up on the policy in Galicia (the Polish part of the Empire).

Some of the corpses of Federal soldiers found by the rebels in Torreón after they capture the town had been executed by their officers, which suggests the soldiers were reluctant to stand and fight.

The government is still denying it lost Torreón.

The Sunday NY Times Magazine has an article about Al Jennings, candidate for governor of Oklahoma, derived from his forthcoming memoirs, entitled “How I Robbed Trains.”

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That’s how you know it’s not covert

Jay “Hey Rube” Carney explain how you know that the covert ZunZuneo program wasn’t a covert program, it was a “development-assistance” program: “when I say a program like this is not covert and then I talk about it, that’s how you know it’s not covert -- because I’m talking about it.” See, and you thought it was a covert program.

If the definition of not-covert is that government officials talk about it after it leaks, I like Edward Snowden’s chances in court.

Okay, no I don’t.

Rather than being covert, Carney says the program was “discreet.” If that sounds like a man furtively sneaking into a cheap motel room in the middle of the day to fuck a woman not his wife, there’s probably a reason for that.

Further evidence of its non-covertness is that it was supposedly debated by Congress. Actually, the covertness of an intelligence-gathering cum covert op like this is not measured simply by the level of disclosure within the US (and I would suggest that “Hey, we told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed session with everyone sworn to secrecy” does not suggest openness and transparency). Covert also refers to the level of disclosure within the country in which we’re operating. There Carney might be on firmer ground, in that after more than 50 years of CIA monkeyshines, there can’t be a Cuban who didn’t know exactly what ZunZuneo was when they saw it. Still, if you’re acting in another country without informing that country’s government, that is what used to be the very definition of covert. That Carney doesn’t seem to have paused for a second to consider that before declaring this psyop not covert tells us something about how the US government sees itself as entitled to do anything anywhere in this Age of Drones.

While this was, obviously, a covert action aimed at undermining the Cuban government, it was also an intelligence-gathering op aimed at discovering the political allegiances and interests of everyone in Cuba, but I’m sure we can’t think of any way in which that sort of data could be misused.

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Today -100: April 4, 1914: Of spies, dead boxers, French scandals, bosses, and sangers

Huerta denies that Torreón has fallen.

A British court convicts Frederick Adolphus Gould (real name: Schroeder) of spying on the Navy for the Germans (he ran a pub with a naval clientele and was able to tell Germany many technical details of British battleships). He is sentenced to six years followed by deportation, the longest sentence ever given in Britain for espionage. This article may well be the first NYT mention of “the secret service police,” five years after MI5 was formed. Schroeder’s wife was indicted as well, but this was later withdrawn.

Headline of the Day -100: “Boxer Dies of Pneumonia.” In the ring, mind you. James Grant, at the end of a ten-round bantam-weight match. His opponent, John Eggers, is exonerated.

The French Chamber of Assemblies disposes of a scandal, rejecting by a vote of 342 to 141 a motion calling for criminal proceedings against former prime ministers Ernest Monis and Joseph Caillaux (you’ll remember Caillaux from his wife shooting the editor of Le Figaro a couple of weeks ago), for interfering with the investigation of financier/scam artist Henri Rochette. They did put a bit of pressure on the magistrates to postpone Rochette’s trial; when it resumed his lawyers tried to say the statute of limitations had expired, Silvio Berlusconi style, but it didn’t work. The debate in the Chamber was the usual calm Gallic affair: only one deputy threatened to challenge Prime Minister Doumergue to a duel.

“Boss” Barnes (or is it “Boss” Bill?), chairman of the NY Republican State Committee, sues William Anderson, the head of the NY Anti-Saloon League, for libel for calling him the “Boss of the Liquor End of the Republican Party.” He objects to the word boss, possibly because in NY it’s usually associated with Tammany, i.e., Democratic bosses? His suit claims that “boss” is “an odious and opprobrious epithet.”

The Post Office bans Margaret Sanger’s magazine The Woman Rebel from the US mails, for advocating birth control.

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Today -100: April 3, 1914: Of thwarted sprots, home rule all round, fannies, and Torreón falls

“General” Kelley of the unemployed army is convicted of vagrancy in Sacramento. His army marches on.

The Tories decide to let Asquith run unopposed in the by-election. Col. Sprot must await another opportunity (spoiler alert: Col. Sprot will actually defeat Asquith in the 1920 general election, and then go on to accomplish... well, that’s it, that’s all he ever accomplished).

Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey has suggested a federal system as a way out of the Home Rule/Ulster impasse. Everybody’s being very polite about it, although I fail to see how that would resolve the fundamental question of whether Ireland should be a single political unit.

Rumors correctly say that a major shipment of rifles bought in the US will be smuggled into Northern Ireland aboard the S.S. ... wait for it... the S.S. Fanny. More will be heard of the Fanny. And a certain amount of shameless giggling.

Suffragettes burn Lisburn Castle in County Antrim, although the fire is put out before doing much damage. Sir Edward Carson is now on the WSPU’s shit list for not including women’s suffrage in his demand for a referendum on Ulster exclusion from Home Rule.

The Treasury Department names the 12 cities in which Federal Reserve banks will be created. There was a lot of haggling over this.

Russia makes it legal for married women to own property, open businesses, get jobs and apply for their own passport without their husband’s permission. Legal separation, short of divorce, is introduced.

Mexico: The rebels take Torreón, but Gen. Velasco escapes.

Constitutionalist authorities in Parral arrest the US consular agent for passing counterfeit money (counterfeits of rebel money, not federal money or “Villa currency”).

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Robust exercise

Roberts, in his McCutcheon opinion: “To require one person to contribute at lower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causes is to penalize that individual for ‘robustly exercis[ing]’ his First Amendment rights.” Or in other words:


(click to enlarge)

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Today -100: April 2, 1914: Of policewomen, wotherspoons, aggressive women, rubbers & hinky dinks, and pure shoes

Pittsburgh gets its first policewomen, four of them. They will look after young girls arriving in the city and investigate liquor law violations in establishments where women are served and go undercover in skimpy clothes, although I may be thinking of Angie Dickinson there.

(Alliterative) Name of the Day -100: newly appointed US Army chief of staff W.W. Wotherspoon.

Lord Cromer, who used to run Egypt for Britain and is a leading anti-suffragist, says hunger-strikers should be allowed to die. He also says that the women’s suffrage movement is doing great harm by making men less courteous to women and women more “aggressive” toward men.

Headline of the Day -100: “‘Bath House John’ Target for Woman.” Marion Drake is running for alderman in Chicago’s First Ward, long the fiefdom of men who glory in the names “Bath House” John Coughlin (who rose from the humble status of a “rubber” in a bath house, which evidently means a masseur) and “Hinky Dink” McKenna, who I assume acquired his sobriquet by having a dink that was particularly hinky.

Roald Amundsen postpones his Arctic expedition until 1915.

The Macon Telegraph defends the wrongful conviction of Leo Frank for murder and attacks the campaign to secure a new trial for him by saying that whatever becomes of him “is of little consequence when compared to the effect which the recent crusade against the courts will have upon them. If a mistake is made involving a single human life it would be deplorable, but it is better that such a mistake should be made than that our legal system should be brought into disrepute. The courts of law are the only protection which the citizen – high or humble – has. If he cannot appeal to them with the assurance that justice will be done, that his rights will be guarded, and that his life and property will be protected, then our system of government is on the ragged edge.” And if that’s not a good reason to execute a demonstrably innocent person, I don’t know what is.

A shoe company sues to prevent enforcement of Kansas’s pure shoe law. Pure shoes, it turns out, are 100% leather. Shoes using substitutes must be labeled.

Alec Guinness is born.

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Today -100: April 1, 1914: Ask not for whom the canal tolls...

The bill repealing the exemption of American ships traveling between the coasts from Panama Canal tolls passes the House 247-162. Speaker “Champ” Clark (D-Missouri) gives a speech denying that his opposition to the bill has anything to do with planning to run against Wilson in 1916. He says “I can be happy without the presidency,” which (spoiler alert) is just as well. Incidentally, the 1912 Democratic platform opposed removing the exemption, but D’s voting for doing so cite another plank against subsidizing businesses, and so have been calling the toll exemption a “ship subsidy.”

A particularly popular sentence in Champ Clark’s speech: “I’d rather see the canal walled up than give the English any control of it.”

The Mexican rebels have been issuing not one but two currencies to compete with the federal government’s. Carranza hq now bans “Villa currency,” which has proven to be easy to counterfeit.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Lynched With Knives.” In Santa Fe, Adolfo Padilla, accused of cutting his wife’s throat, is dragged out of jail by masked men who stab him to death.

A black woman, Marie Scott, is lynched in Muskogee, OK. She had stabbed a white man who’d been fresh with her in the negro section of Wagoner.

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Today -100: March 31, 1914: Asquith has run away

Sir John French, head of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir John Ewart, adjutant general to the Armed Forces, stick to their resignations. Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely again offers his resignation, and this time it’s accepted. Prime Minister Asquith will take over that job as well. Which means (as it meant before World War I) that he is required to resign his parliamentary seat and run again in a by-election, while continuing as prime minister. His opponent, unless the other parties decide to let him run unopposed, will be a Tory who is named Col. Sprot, because of course he is. Asquith’s absence from Parliament will conveniently make it unable to question him for a couple of weeks, including the period in which the Home Rule Bill is debated. “Premier Asquith has run away,” the Daily Mail says.

Count Zeppelin invents a soundless airship for the German military.

Stories from the siege of Torreón from war correspondent John Reed, as played by Warren Beatty: Federal commander Velasco going insane and having to be put under restraint. Pancho Villa personally throwing hand grenades.

The debate in Congress on repealing the exemption from Panama Canal tolls for US ships traveling between the East and West coasts of the US has been contentious. Woodrow Wilson is angry that he’s been accused of doing a secret deal with Britain on this.

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Today -100: March 30, 1914: Of vice wars, censorship, espionage, plumes, currencies, traffic cops, and wild ballets

Vice Headline of the Day -100: “Vice War in Alton Menaces Churches.” In a little local dispute over prohibition, the Alton, Illinois YMCA, where dry meetings were held, is burned down, along with an alderman’s grocery store.

All the newspapers in Mexico City wrongly reported that the Constitutionalists were defeated at Torreón except one, El País. In other news, El País has been closed by the government. In other news, no one in Mexico City actually knows what is going on in Torreón.

A Russian inventor and telegraph engineer named Jhidkovsky is arrested for intercepting wireless messages from the War Office in St Petersburg and selling them to an (unnamed) foreign government.

Plume Headline of the Day -100: “French Officers May Wear Plumes.” The US ban on the importation of plumage will not apply to the humorous hats worn by officers assigned to French missions in the US.

There are now two currencies circulating in Mexico, issued by the two rival governments, neither of them backed by much of anything and both rapidly declining in value.

There is talk among the rebels of splitting the north of Mexico into a separate country.

A bill before the NY Legislature would increase the number of traffic cops in NYC to 1,000, nearly doubling the number of men directing traffic. A recent law made it a crime to disobey the orders of a traffic cop.

Proquest L.A. Times Headline Typo of the Day -100: “SHOOTS AT ZELAYA.: Revengeful Nicaraguan Tries to Kill Former President in Spain. But Ballet Goes Wild.”

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Today -100: March 29, 1914: Of new countries, street cars, hissing, feudists, and the paraphernalia and pretensions of war

Baja California has evidently seceded from Mexico.

Headline of the Day -100: “3-Cent Fare Riots Averted.” A Toledo, Ohio ordinance requiring that street car fares not exceed 3¢ went into effect at midnight. The car company is fighting this and there were worries that the militia would have to be called in to restore order if increased fares provoked riots. Instead, the company is only accepting the old higher fares (which I think were 5¢); if people offer the legally mandated 3¢, they are allowed to ride free (something about not establishing a legal precedent by accepting the 3¢ fare). So no rioting today.

A Dublin magistrate reaffirms that there is a Common Law right to hiss a play.

Orville Wright says current airplanes can’t make trans-Atlantic flights.

The Danish Senate unexpectedly rejects the Danish-American arbitration treaty. It’s not clear why.

Thomas Edison’s film studio in the Bronx burns down. A lot of films, sets, costumes, and cylinders intended to serve as the soundtrack for films, are destroyed.

Obituary of the Day -100: Randall McCoy, or as the NYT terms him, “Randall McCoy, Feudist”. Of Hatfields & McCoys feud fame, patriarch of the McCoys, he dies at 88, so I guess he wins.

H.H. Munro (Saki) has published “When William Came,” a sci-fi book about England under German occupation (this is the US edition; the British one was last year). Bands playing “Germania Rules the Waves,” that sort of thing.

And H.G. Wells has published “The World Set Free,” which suggests the coming of something resembling nuclear bombs and warns of the growing destructiveness that technology had brought to the world, and the failure of social and governmental structures to keep pace:

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, ‘fooled around’ with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

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Today -100: March 28, 1914: I don’t know of any assembly on the part of the working people that would be lawful

Oregon Gov. Oswald West is still on his anti-saloon tear. He warns Salem’s Mayor Hilda Larson that if she doesn’t stop violations of liquor laws in Salem he will close all the saloons. She had actually requested the DA investigate the sale of liquor to minors – in saloons competing with her husband’s. Instead, he has been arrested for the sale of liquor to minors; spite work by the other saloon-keepers, Mayor Larson says.

Frank Tannenbaum, the IWW leader who led the raid of the unemployed on NYC churches, is convicted for “participating in an unlawful assemblage.” He told the court, “I don’t know of any assembly on the part of the working people that would be lawful.” The judge informs him that the United States is “the best place in the world for every man who has industry” and accuses him of failing to appreciate the spirit of American institutions before sentencing him to a year in an American institution and a $500 fine, which should be a spur to industry.

Ironic-in-Hindsight Headline of the Day -100: “Lusitania Brings Shipwrecked Men.”

The NYT editorializes that Canada has the right idea in sending a United Mine Workers organizer to prison for 4 years for his part in riots associated with the coal strike in Nanaime, and giving shorter sentences to 50 more strikers. The Times seems to think that the law in the US is entirely on the side of strikers which... I can’t... even....

Headline of the Day -100: “FLIES 2 MILES UPSIDE DOWN; Huck Performs Remarkable Feat at Northampton Aviation Field.” One assumes on purpose.

The king of Italy wrote a four-volume book on coins.

Russia will ban the export of horses in order to keep the army’s equine bills down.

The New York Legislature finishes up its session in a frenzy of legislatin’. It passes bills to restrict the sale of heroin and to carry out executions only in one prison, Sing Sing. A bill for widows’ pensions passed the Assembly 100-2 but was blocked in the Senate. The Assembly fails to pay the enormous expenses spent so far in trying to extradite escaped insane murderer Harry Thaw from New Hampshire (and from Canada before that).

The British Army issues a new order that officers and soldiers may not be asked what they would do in hypothetical contingencies such as enforcing Home Rule, that officers and soldiers may not ask for assurances about future orders, and that it is the duty of officers and soldiers to obey every lawful command. Prior to this month, you wouldn’t have thought any of that needed saying.

Suffragettes are believed to have burned down the Belfast Lough country residence of retired Maj. Gen. Sir Hugh McCalmont, whose grounds have been used by Ulster Unionists to practice military drills.

A bunch of NY Gov. Glynn’s appointees are confirmed by the Legislature. Having learned the lesson of his predecessor’s impeachment, his nominees were all good Tammany men.

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Today -100: March 27, 1914: Eat faster!

The Massachusetts Legislature votes to hold a referendum on women’s suffrage, although it will take another vote in the Lege in 1915 first.

This week the Women’s Freedom League picketed Scotland Yard to protest its continued employment of constables who knew about the sexual relations between another constable and a 14-year-old girl.

The Women’s Social and Political Union announces that in the fiscal year ending February 28, its income was £36,896, an increase of £8,000 over the previous year. Militancy pays.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “‘Eat Faster,’ Kaiser Rules.” Kaiser Wilhelm reforms dinner: fashionable dinners must now last no more than 45 minutes, and women will no longer leave men to their cigars and dirty stories after dinner, but will remain and socialize with them.

The kaiser refuses the crown prince permission to go on a trip to Africa. But is it for financial reasons, or because he realized it was less about visiting the German colonies for the prince than hunting, or “owing to recent events, of which the public are not informed”? Berlin is abuzz.

The chief of the British Army General Staff, Brig. Gen. Sir John French, and Adjutant Gen. Sir John Spencer Ewart resign over their part in acquiescing to the Curragh mutineers. They signed the written assurance that the military wouldn’t be used against Ulster, and view the Cabinet’s retraction of that unauthorized assurance as a personal slight. They say they’ll stay if Minister of War Seely is fired. So the response to a crisis about members of the military dictating to the government is to do it again.

Reports from the rebel attack on Torreón are contradictory and untrustworthy, as was the custom, but it seems the Federales have driven off the rebels through superior artillery.

Havana establishes a quarantine after cases of bubonic plague show up.

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Today -100: March 26, 1914: I repudiate the hellish suggestion!

Parliament is told that when Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely gave Brig. Gen. Gough those written assurances that the government wouldn’t use the military to “crush political opposition” to Home Rule, he did so without consulting the Cabinet, which has now rescinded the guarantee. And asked for it to be returned. Evidently the 37th Cavalry doesn’t get a veto over government policy after all. Seely has offered his resignation, but it hasn’t been accepted (yet). Probably just as well for Britain this clown wasn’t in that post when there was an actual war to minister.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill tells Parliament that he did indeed order a battle squadron to Ireland, just in case, but when the army maneuvers went off without fighting he’d decided to delay. Does that mean, a Tory MP asks, that he expected the maneuvers to lead to fighting? “I repudiate the hellish suggestion!” Winston thunders, as was the custom. He explains the order to embark field guns by saying it was just for exercise in case of rain. Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law pretends to believe that the whole thing was a plot to provoke an uprising in Ulster in order to crush it, a plot which was thwarted only by the convictions of the Army that, in the matter of Home Rule, the British government was as much a revolutionary committee as Huerta’s regime in Mexico and its orders could therefore be legitimately resisted.

The Assize Court rules that the British government can’t ban the importation of arms into Ireland.

Har Dayal, a former lecturer in Indian philosophy at Stanford Universtiy, is arrested ostensibly as an illegal alien, but actually because of his anarchist beliefs and because the British would like to get their hands on him. The position of the commissioner-general of immigration is that all Hindus like Dayal are unassimilable and liable to become a public charge, even if they’re rich like Dayal, who taught for free at Stanford. Dayal will flee to Europe.

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Today -100: March 25, 1914: Of volcanos, planning meals in Torreón, cheers against kings, and the double standard

In Naples, panic ensues after some guy says he saw the giant statue of St. Januarius, patron saint of the city, change position and turn its back on Mount Vesuvius. An eruption is therefore imminent, according to idiots.

The Constitutionalists are besieging Torreón and have captured parts of it. Pancho Villa sends a message to the Federal general, asking him to breakfast tomorrow in the town, presumably left-overs from the dinner he boasted he’d be eating in Torreón three days ago. Villa is departing from his usual practice of killing wounded enemy soldiers.

At Henriette Caillaux’s preliminary hearing, she says that she shot Calmette because she was afraid her husband, who is a good shot, would kill him and go to jail. She bought a gun for the first time that morning (and practiced in the gunseller’s basement shooting range) and shot low, she says, just to scare Calmette, somehow hitting him four times. She talks about her “anguish” and “delirium” a lot, which is setting the stage for a crime-of-passion defense, which usually works, at least in Paris and for female murderers.

Other prisoners at Saint Lazare women’s penitentiary (staffed entirely by nuns, I believe) are complaining about the privileges Madame Caillaux’s getting (wearing her own clothes, catered food, a second cell for use as a reception room, etc), and got put in solitary in retaliation.

Gen. Sir Hubert Gough returns to Northern Ireland in triumph, telling the officers of the Third Cavalry Brigade that he has a guarantee – a written guarantee yet – that they will not be used to enforce Home Rule in NI.

Headline of the Day -100 (Daily Telegraph): “Cheers Against the King.” During the House of Commons discussion of the Curragh Mutiny, John Ward (Lib) says that Parliament must decide whether it will make the laws without interference from the king or the army. He paused after “king,” and there was a loud cheering from Irish Nationalist, Labour, and some Liberal MPs, indicating their displeasure with what they (correctly) believe was behind-the-scenes royal interference in the Home Rule Bill, which forced Asquith to allow Ulster that six-year opt-out. The NYT says of the cheering, “Parliament had not witnessed such an obviously hostile criticism of the Throne in the memory of the oldest member”.

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond says “The Ulster Orange plot has been revealed.” The volunteer army of Loyalists never intended to fight, he says: “The plan was to put up the appearance of a fight, and then, by society influence, seduce the officers of the British army. By this means they intended to intimidate the government and to defeat the will of the British people.”

The London Times editorializes that it is a great mistake to pass laws which people will not obey; it brings all law into contempt. Votes for Women will point out that this is a “frank defence of law-breaking,” which applies as much to militant suffragist methods as to those of Ulster men. Similarly, Lloyd George asks in Parliament what moral right Bonar Law would have, if the Tories took power, to punish suffragettes. And The Suffragette says that if the army is allowed to decide not to move against Unionists, then police, wardresses, and prison doctors can refuse to coerce suffragettes.

A National Organization of Women Suffrage Societies of Canada is formed, bringing together the various provincial groups.

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