Today -100: June 17, 1914: Of races, ex-republics, civil wars within civil wars, and massacres

Over 1,000 cops protect the races at Ascot (and the king and queen) against possible suffragette disruption.

The Italian general strike, such as it was, is over. And I guess the republic is un-declared.

The US delegates to the Niagara talks shuffle off to Buffalo to chat unofficial-like with Carranza’s delegates.

There’s some sort of conflict within the Constitutionalists between Villa and Carranza. Villa’s men seize the Constitutionalist bureau of information in Juarez from Carranza’s men and indeed seize some of Carranza’s men (although Villa will soon claim that his men misinterpreted his orders). There’s a story, which sounds like one of those rumors but is actually more or less true, that Villa resigned last week but all the military chiefs said they would accept no one else as their leader.

Turks are reported to have massacred 100 Greeks in the town of Phokia, and thrown the bodies down wells, as was the custom. The LA Times says that Greece is about to invade Turkey. Russia is sending a warship to Smyrna.

And the civil war in Albania, Muslims revolting against the imported prince William, is bubbling along.

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The height of folly

John McCain says it would be the “height of folly” to partner with Iran to stabilize Iraq. John McCain – bad choice of partner – folly... no, I can’t think of anything to say about this.

Speaking of bad decisions, how many of the liberals now complaining about all of the talking heads talking their heads off about Iraq on their teevees being the ones who were wrong about Iraq ten years ago were berating Terry Gross last week for asking Hillary Clinton when and why she stopped being wrong about gay marriage?

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Today -100: June 16, 1914: A man is a fool who attempts to avoid the income tax

Dr. Charles Mercier, a British psychiatrist and public supporter of the forcible feeding of suffragette prisoners, has a letter in the London Times which says that if Home Secretary McKenna is correct that scores of women would volunteer if one were allowed to hunger strike to death, it would be another example of “epidemic mimicry,” such as fashion, witch-finding, suicide, tarantism, flagelantism, lycanthropy, and the violence of the French Revolution.

Countess Mollie Russell sues the 2nd Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) for restoration of conjugal rights. The earl has a famously complicated personal life, and was convicted by a trial in the House of Lords of bigamy for marrying Mollie in 1901, because English law didn’t recognize his Reno divorce from his first wife. He is the first and I believe only Labour Party member of the House of Lords.

The new federal income tax has (so far) fallen short of the income it was expected to bring in, by $23 million, and the Treasury Dept is readying itself to go after tax-dodgers. “A man is a fool who attempts to avoid the income tax,” says Commissioner Osborne. “He is sure to be detected sooner or later. There is no chance that tax dodgers can escape.” And sure enough, rich people have been paying every cent of their taxes ever since.

Headline of the Day -100 (L.A. Times): “Wilson Alleges a Plot To Break His Will.” Pres. Wilson notes that a coordinated flood of letters has been coming from businessmen demanding that Congress adjourn before dealing with the anti-trust bill (“wantonly harassing business,” as one circular letter calls it) and claiming that business is being harmed by the prospect of legislation. Wilson says that business is doing just fine, and that any depression is purely psychological.

Storms in Paris. A street caves in at the Place Saint Philippe du Roule killing 14.

The ABC mediators respond to Gen. Carranza’s letter naming delegates to the Niagara conference by politely reminding him that he seems to have somehow neglected to mention whether he will agree to their conditions (an armistice and accepting everything already agreed to). Well, he’s busy, he probably just forgot. In the meantime, the US and Huerta delegates are deadlocked over who should be the next president of Mexico, and the mediators are considering calling it a day.

Latest rumor in Mexico: Pancho Villa has been forced to flee to the US after his troops revolt because they discovered papers showing he had agreed to sell part of Mexico to the US.

The House of Commons passes the third reading of the Plural Voting Bill, which would eliminate multiple votes for people who own property in more than one parliamentary constituency or are university graduates. Nothing will come of this until 1948.

An alleged plot by suffragettes to blow up London reservoirs is thwarted, if it ever existed.

Men from the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine doing their mandatory military service will no longer be allowed to serve in those provinces, because Alsatians are to blame for having leaked to the press about all the anti-Alsatian bigotry in the barracks during the conflict between the military and locals last year.

The Bijou theater in New York re-opens as a colored theater, with an all-negro production, “The Darktown Follies of 1914.” The NYT notes that the ticket-seller is still a white man and the owners are, um, named Rosenberg, but the ushers are black.

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Today -100: June 15, 1914: Of mobs and rioters (yeah, I said it, what’re you gonna do about it?)

The rebels are advancing on Guadalajara.

The NYT’s Italian correspondent breathlessly tells of the depredations during the short-lived republic declared by the socialists/anarchists, with food requisitioned and distributed for free and so on. It notes the relative lack of loss of life both when the mobs were in control and when the forces of order reasserted themselves, attributing the lack of bloodshed during the latter to “patience, endurance, and self-control, which heretofore has been supposed to be an attribute of the humble followers of St. Francis of Assisi rather than characteristics of military men,” but fails to enumerate the virtues which stopped the mobs killed all the rich people.

The Brotherhood Welfare Association in New York City (i.e., hoboes) turn down a kind offer to transport them all to Kansas via cattle cars (250 hoboes to a 60-foot car) to help bring in the wheat harvest, with no guarantee of proper wages in Kansas (and I didn’t note a mention of return fares either), saying it’s Pullman cars or nothing.

The fight between the miners’ union and the IWW in Butte, Montana, continues. As with any conflict involving miners, dynamite was available, and was used on the house of one union official and the safe in the union’s offices. A crowd rescued two prisoners from the jail and hijacked a fire truck. The mob also visited the three newspaper offices and suggested politely that they refrain from using the words “mob” or “rioters.”

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Today -100: June 14, 1914: Of furies, Chios and Lesbos, republics, darlings, and Vice President Adlai Stevenson

Queen Mary is threatening to leave London for the rest of the Season if any more of those horrid “furies,” as she calls them, show up to disrupt her entertainments and remind her that women are being tortured in British prisons.

Oh, and suffragettes burned another cricket pavilion, this one in Reigate. One begins to suspect they have something against cricket.

Greece formally annexes the islands of Chios and Mitylene (I assume by the latter the NYT means Lesbos, on which the town of Mitylene is located), which it seized in the first Balkan War but hadn’t formally annexed. Turkey is not best pleased.

There’s been a debate in the NYT letters page over whether NYC should have a public defender’s office.

The Niagara conference is discussing who the next president of Mexico should be, almost as if their opinion is, you know, relevant. The US wants a prominent Constitutionalist, the Huertaists want an obscure one, and I think the ABC countries want a neutral guy (later the Huertaists would insist on a neutral). Carranza’s delegates still haven’t shown up, evidently having been given orders to come no closer than Buffalo until word came whether they’d be admitted.

Crowds have taken to the streets in major Italian cities and many minor ones. Railroads and telegraph wires and churches are destroyed. A republic is proclaimed in many of these places (the Times is a little unclear on whether anarchists or socialists or some unholy combination is behind these events, but then it’s not clear that the Times understands the difference). And then the military crushed them. Many (well, some unknown number) are dead, but the NYT persists in seeing it as a “farce,” because Italians are funny or something.

France: René Viviani succeeds in forming a cabinet. Nobody expects it to last very long.

In Butte, Montana, Wobblies attack a miners’ union parade and invade the Miners’ Union Hall. Would have blown it up, but there was a saloon next door.

The German army breaks another zeppelin, and two more French aviators die in a crash.

Name of the Day -100: Jasper T. Darling, the secretary of the National Bureau for the Advancement of Patriotism, who is complaining that Sen. Smoot plagiarized an old speech of his on Decoration Day.

Death of the Day -100: Adlai E. Stevenson, vice president in the second Cleveland administration and William Jennings Bryan’s running mate in 1896 after the D’s failed to give him the nomination for president, making him one of only two vice presidents to run for the thankless job again under a different presidential candidate. Grandfather of Adlai II, who ran for president against Eisenhower twice.

Charles Fairbanks, if you were wondering who the second one was, and don’t pretend you weren’t.

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Today -100: June 13, 1914: Of delegates, eternal friendship, ribots, balloons, and tangoes

Carranza appoints three delegates to the Niagara conference, simply ignoring the mediators’ demand for an armistice as a condition of allowing them to participate. I believe he’s calling their bluff.

Japanese Vice Admiral Kuroi, visiting San Francisco with some cruisers, as is the custom, says the friendship between the US and Japan will never be broken.

New French Prime Minister Alexandre Ribot forms his cabinet, takes office, and resigns office after losing a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies. 2½ days in power. Next up: Viviani, again.

Many people think Greece and Turkey are about to start another war. Greece is complaining about Turkey’s expulsion of thousands of Greeks.

Rep. Matthew Neely (D-West Virginia) presents impeachment charges against US District Judge Alston Dayton, who during the recent coal strikes issued injunctions against miners and said he wouldn’t let the United Mine Workers operate within his jurisdiction.

A large balloon crashes during a balloon race and is currently lost somewhere in the forests of the Cascade Mountains, its captain injured, which we know because the news was sent by carrier pigeon. (Update from tomorrow’s paper: they crashed into a pine tree and were caught in its branches 100 feet above the ground. They sent the pigeon and then climbed down, the end.)

Headline of the Day -100: “Queen Mary Sees Tango and Likes It.”

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Today -100: June 12, 1914: Advertisement of their acts is a thing they desire above all

The House Insular Affairs Committee has worked up a proposed constitution for the Philippines. Not surprisingly, it’s a “condensation” of the US Constitution. Members of the Congress will have to be literate in English or Spanish and own property.

The Senate passes Wilson’s bill to repeal the exemption of American ships from Panama Canal tolls, 50-35.

Headline of the Day -100: “Militants Blow up Coronation Chair.” In Westminster Abbey. The news reached Parliament while it was debating what should be done with the suffragettes who commit crimes. Home Secretary Reginald McKenna insists that government policies are working and should be given time. He claims that of 83 prisoners temporarily released from prison under the Cat & Mouse Act, 15 gave up militant activity, 20 are in hiding, and 6 have fled the country. And the number of women sent to prison has decreased since the Cat and Mouse Act (even he calls it that) was implemented, which he says shows its deterrent effect (arguably, it led to a shift from open militancy such as protests at the House of Commons which courted arrest to more violent secret acts which avoid it). McKenna asks the press to stop reporting on militant activities: “Advertisement of their acts is a thing they desire above all.” He talks up plans to go after the Women’s Social and Political Union’s subscribers in court, portraying them as “rich women paying their unfortunate victims to undergo all the horrors of hunger and thirst striking” (The WSPU will respond by asking pointedly if he’d be willing to undergo those horrors for £2 a week). He quotes an (unnamed) medical expert who says that the class of militants now entering prison shows a decline from earlier, that they are more “highly nervous,” even physically “degenerate,” in other words that cripples, epileptics and women with heart and lung disease, who can’t stand up to forcible feeding, are being deliberately employed. McKenna, not the brightest bulb, claims that all the militants are paid, but also says that if they weren’t forcibly fed they are such fanatics they would starve themselves to death, and for each one allowed to die, scores more would come forward for the honor of earning the crown of martyrdom.

The general strike in Italy is back on. Barricades, fighting, attacks on trains. Six warships have been sent to threaten Ancona.

Woodrow Wilson hasn’t decided if he’s going to campaign for any congressional candidates this fall.

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Today -100: June 11, 1914: I don’t want to watch spooners; it is a mean job

Evidently Woodrow Wilson accepted an invitation to a Catholic mass for next Thanksgiving. The Reformed Church Synod considered criticizing him for this but instead decided to set up a rival service and force him to choose. If that doesn’t say Thanksgiving, I don’t know what does.

A general strike fails in Italy and is called off.

Police seize Sylvia Pankhurst as she attempts a deputation to PM Asquith.

Bayonne’s lady policewoman Ruth McAdie resigns, tired of being given the duty of breaking up couples in the park: “I don’t want to watch spooners; it is a mean job.”

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Today -100: June 10, 1914: England all over

The US Cabinet decides to prevent any further arms shipments to Mexico from the US, such as the one that nearly derailed the Niagara talks. So a shipment of ammunition intended for Tampico has been ordered detained in Galveston, although no actual law allows for such an order. And gun-running via third countries (or pretending to be going to third countries but actually going to Mexico, as is the case with the liner Arcadia) can continue.

At the Niagara Falls conference, the American and Huerta delegates are drawing up their fantasy cabinet tables. They’ve now agreed that the new president must be a Constitutionalist, but not Carranza or Pancho Villa. So now the US and the bitter enemies of the Constitutionalists are choosing which Constitutionalists should best represent the Constitutionalists.

Starvation in besieged Mazatlan forces the Federal governor to permit any non-combatant who wishes to leave for the Constitutionalist lines to do so (knowing that many will be recruited by the rebels).

The Danish Parliament votes 102-6 for women’s suffrage (and to democratize elections for the upper house). But the Conservatives boycott the vote in the upper house, so there’s no quorum. Prime Minister Carl Theodor Zahle will advise the king to dissolve the upper house and call new elections.

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond gives his party’s official approval to the Nationalist volunteer movement.

A suffragette “destroys” George Romney’s “Portrait of a Boy” in the Birmingham Art Gallery.



George Bernard Shaw writes in The Evening Standard: “As we have neither conviction enough to starve the militants to death nor common sense enough to pledge ourselves to the inevitable reform, there is nothing to be done but wait until the women provoke a mob to lynch them and the Government hangs a satisfactory number of the mob in expiation. Then the women will get their votes after the last inch of mischief and suffering has been squeezed out of a situation which several civilized and reasonable countries already have disposed of without the slightest trouble. That is England all over.”

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Today -100: June 9, 1914: Of titled suffragettes, sieges, and unwanted Cohens

The (London) Standard publishes a list of the most socially eminent subscribers to the Women’s Social and Political Union (lists which were seized by the police in the raid a week or two back). They include a couple of princesses, various Ladies-with-a-capital-L, a bishop, and Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor in England and the sister of the president of the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The Standard accuses the princesses of being class traitors, because, it claims, the suffragettes had plans to burn Hampton Court Palace.

The Huerta Junta now claims it never intended to blockade Tampico, and won’t withdraw from the Niagara talks after all.

The US follows Huerta in accepting in principle the Niagara conference plan.

Under siege by the rebels, Mazatlan is starving.

NY state Attorney General Thomas Carmody directs district attorneys to prosecute summer resorts advertising that they don’t accommodate people of certain races, creeds, or colors.

The Supreme Court rules that Indians count as “mixed-race,” and thus allowed to sell lands on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, if they have even a drop of white blood (the federal government was arguing that less than 50% does not count).

Rep. Fred Britten (R-Ill.) introduces a bill to make it illegal for cabinet secretaries to accept pay for giving lectures, as William Jennings Bryan has been doing. It would also ban the practice for members of Congress, but only when it’s in session.

Headline of the Day -100: “No Country Wants Cohen.” Poor Cohen. Nathan Cohen, who was born in Russia, arrived in the US from Brazil two years ago and went insane a year later, which was within the three-year period after arriving in which he could be legally deported for insanity. So he was shipped back to Brazil, which refused to let him land, then back to Ellis Island, then to Russia, which refused to let him land, saying he had no papers proving he was Russian, then back to Ellis Island, then to Brazil again, which still refused to let him land. Now he will evidently live the remainder of his life at Ellis Island, which I’m sure had excellent facilities for long-term care for the mentally ill, at the expense of the steamship company that originally brought him from Brazil.

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Today -100: June 8, 1914: No one wants to be prime minister of France

The US delegates at the Niagara conference tell the Mexicans that they intend to keep Tampico an open port, by which they mean open to arms shipped to the rebels from the US in violation of its promise to prevent such shipments. When the US said after the Constitutionalists captured Tampico that it would ensure Tampico remained an open port, they mostly meant oil being exported to the US rather than arms being imported, but hey an open port is an open port.

Constitutionalist governors will declare currency issued by banks invalid.

Yesterday (a Sunday) suffragist speakers in several parks London were attacked and their stands destroyed. The NYT says that they were saved from beatings or duckings by the police. Although in the past such attacks have been by youths and young men out for a bit of violent Sunday fun, tolerated by the police up to a certain point, the NYT is willing to accept the actions of a small number of thugs as “striking evidence that the public has been goaded by the militants beyond the limits of endurance,” while failing to accept the actions of a small number of militant women as striking evidence of anything larger.

British suffragists have been accusing Holloway Gaol of drugging hunger-striking prisoners, but so have they. A solicitor’s clerk is charged with smuggling an emetic to Grace Roe.

France: Delcassé turns down the invitation to form a government, citing health reasons. So does Paul Deschanel, citing being a manic pixie dream girl, no wait that’s Zooey, and so do Jean Dupuy and Paul Peytral. Next up: Alexandre Ribot. This will be the 72-year-old Ribot’s third time as prime minister, the previous times being in the ‘90s. I’d suggest he enjoy it while it lasts.

The Greek government denounces the Carnegie Peace Foundation’s commission’s report on atrocities during the Balkan Wars, especially something about Bulgarian atrocities being committed under “provocation.”

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Today -100: June 7, 1914: Of blockades, French governments, naval tutors, and sinking steamers

The Huerta Junta announces a blockade of Tampico, to prevent US ships (including, rather gloriously, the schooner Sunshine) landing arms for the rebels.

The mediators at Niagara Falls think that if the Constitutionalists will only agree to a suspension of hostilities, the fighting will never resume. The mediators at Niagara Falls are delusional idiots, and their delusional idiocy is reportedly shared by Woodrow Wilson, who thinks that if he just mansplains to the rebels that their goals can be achieved through this plan of pacification they’ll agree not to seize the power they’re on the brink of seizing.

Following the French parliamentary elections, President Poincaré offered the office of prime minister to René Viviani, but he proves unable to form a ministry. That’s okay, nothing important ever happens in June. Viviani’s efforts foundered on divisions over the length of compulsory military service, recently extended from 2 years to 3. Ironically, that issue will become moot very soon.

Next up at bat: Théophile Delcassé. The NYT assures us that Germany has forgiven him for his anti-German policies when he was foreign minister. (Spoiler alert: he won’t be prime minister either, but he will have a chance to be an anti-German foreign minister again).

Mother Jones is visiting Canada, after immigration officials’ decision to exclude her was overruled by Ottawa. British Columbia has its own coal strike...

The Italian royal family announces that for the first time the heir to the throne, Prince Humbert, will be a sailor instead of a soldier. This summer he will be put on board a man-of-war with a “naval tutor.” He is 9.

Headline of the Day -100 (NYT Sunday Magazine): “Making Life in Russia Intolerable for Jewish People.”

Naval and Not-At-All Scatological Headline of the Day -100: “Corinthian Sinks a Steamer.”

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It’s outrageous to say that limiting speech is necessary for democracy

Sen. Chuck Grassley condemns Pat Leahy’s proposed constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United ruling. “It’s outrageous to say that limiting speech is necessary for democracy,” Grassley says, noting that this would be the very first amendment to the original Bill of Rights. But Grassley was for amending the Bill of Rights before he was against it.

Grassley has repeatedly tried to get a constitutional amendment outlawing flag-burning.

Of course, Grassley doesn’t believe that the First Amendment was intended to cover “nonverbal speech.” Campaign donations, on the other hand...

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Today -100: June 6, 1914: I pray God it may not be necessary for our boys at Vera Cruz to use any more force

Britain has recently banned mixed-race boxing matches.

A Milan jury, evidently convinced by Vincenzo Perugia’s claim that he only stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in order to return it to Italy and certainly not for money, gives him only a one-year sentence.

The London Times ponders how suffragettes might be dealt with. They can’t be deported to an uninhabited island because they’d just come back. Flogging isn’t really on. The general public would be okay with letting the hunger strikers starve themselves to death, but under the current law prison authorities are legally liable for prisoners’ survival. The Times supports new legislation to remove that liability. Indeed, it rather licks its lips at the thought of suffragettes dying in prison.

The NYT mentions the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’s campaign to oppose Liberal candidates for parliament and back Labour ones as a means to achieve women’s suffrage. Which I mention because, while the NYT deplores the militant suffragettes and keeps insisting their tactics won’t achieve anything, this is their first mention of the non-militant NUWSS, which is far larger than the militant wing of the suffrage movement, in months, and even this mention is a parenthetical aside in an article headlined “Another Church Burned.” The London Times isn’t much better. Organize 100 quiet meetings and 1,000 quiet petitions and *crickets* but burn one church....

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond refuses to meet suffragists, saying previous meetings only led to unpleasantness – and if there’s one thing Irish politicians hate, it’s unpleasantness – and that the issue of suffrage should be decided by the Home Rule Parliament rather than in the Home Rule Bill. Of course that means a Home Rule Parliament elected exclusively by men.

Woodrow Wilson, speaking to graduates of Annapolis: “I pray God it may not be necessary for our boys at Vera Cruz to use any more force.” He calls the US army and navy “the instruments of civilization, not... instruments of aggression.”

The Mexican Federales will probably send gunboats to intercept the Antilla and its cargo of arms for the rebels. If that happens, they will probably be stopped by US warships. Also, another ship has left another US port with arms for the rebels, even though the US was supposed to be preventing that while talks are going on.

Speaking of gun-running, some Ulsterman with a yacht smuggles 3,000 rifles to the Ulster Volunteers, most of which are unloaded in Belfast “under the eyes of the police,” whatever that means.

Margaret Brown, aka “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” of Titanic fame, is running for the US Senate in Colorado.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes, is published.

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Today -100: June 5, 1914: Mexico is entitled to clean up its own back yard

Carranza is taking his time in replying to a note from the ABC mediators, although his agent says, “Mexico is entitled to clean up its own back yard, and does not seek nor desire any interference from any quarter.”

Sylvia Pankhurst, distancing herself from the authoritarian leadership style of her mother and sister, plans to have the deputation to Asquith from her East London Federation of Suffragettes elected by mass meetings, with each meeting electing two women and one man.

Somehow I think that when the NYT calls Theodore Roosevelt “as wise as a whole zoological garden of serpents” for refusing to run for governor of New York, it’s not really a compliment.

Headline of the Day -100: “Albania’s King Not Saluted.” King (technically, still just a prince) William had luncheon aboard the Austrian dreadnought Tegethoff, but they skipped the usual 21-gun salute for fear it would damage talks with the insurgents (who still demanded that William be replaced by a Muslim prince).

Railroad people are testifying against young Sam Rayburn’s Anti-Trust Bill to curb the powers of railroad companies. The lawyer for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad says the bill would give the Interstate Commerce Commission dictatorial powers such as in the most tyrannical days of Venice and Russia.

An (unnamed) member of the British royal household is accused of cheating at cards at London clubs. The king has personally interviewed the accused and his accusers, after he’d invited the man to dinner after the Derby, which resulted in a boycott of the event by members of the Jockey Club, including various people with “duke” and “prince” in front of their names. The king has now tried to banish the man from England, but he refuses to go.

At Buckingham Palace during the running of the debutantes, or whatever they call it, Mary Blomfield (daughter of Lady Blomfield) starts to appeal to the king on the subject of suffrage or possibly forcible feeding before she’s tackled. And that was after the police, expecting such an attempt, carefully scrutinized everyone arriving at the palace. Royal garden parties will be canceled for the rest of the season.

The second half of that story is a description of what all the women who attended the Court were wearing, because of course it is.

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Today -100: June 4, 1914: Of bloody brats, crassness, antillas, morning canters, dunkards, and wet wobblies

Bernard Shaw got away with including the line “not bloody likely” in Pygmalion, but the Lord Chamberlain bans an entire play, “The Supplanters” by Irish unknown J. B. McCarthy, for including the phrase “bloody brats.”

The NYT finds the depiction of Red Indians in movies to be insulting to civilized Native Americans (who are now the majority of Native Americans, it says), although it praises “Hiawatha” (which the Internet Movie Database says was the first film with an all-Native American cast)(but as usual doesn’t say whether it’s one of the many silent films which have been lost, which would be useful information to include, IMDb) for its accurate depiction of Indian culture. That film and “L’inferno,” the first and quite possibly only film with an all Dante-scholar cast, prove that “The period of crassness in this new art is near its close.”

Although it was understood that no arms would be shipped from the US to either side in Mexico while the Niagara Falls talks were going on, the liner Antilla leaves New York for Tampico with 3 million rounds of ammunition (and two airplanes) for the rebels. William Jennings Bryan claims to know nothing about it, saying that orders to prevent such sailings were sent to Southern ports first and may not have reached NY yet. Totally believable.

A suffragette attacks an attendant who tries to stop her hacking at paintings with a hatchet at the Doré Gallery in London, evidently not having gotten the message about harming only property. Elsewhere, two suffragettes attack Dr. Forward, the medical officer of Holloway Gaol with a horse whip (or dogwhip, according to the London Times). And another cricket pavilion goes up in flames, as was the custom.

The British government is thinking about charging every contributor to Women’s Social and Political Union funds with conspiracy. The theory is that most of the arson and picketing and whatnot is performed these days by women on the WSPU payroll rather than volunteers as in the glory days, making the WSPU vulnerable to an attack on its finances. Also, it allows the government to portray the militants as well-paid mercenaries (they are, of course, neither).

Sylvia Pankhurst is threatening to hunger-strike on the steps of the House of Commons unless Prime Minister Asquith receives a deputation. This is potentially a significant escalation in tactics: all previous hunger strikes have taken place in prison.

That article on various suffragette doings ends with the Sentence of The Day -100: “The King has discontinued his morning canter in Rotten Row.”

Czar Nicholas is thinking about responding to the decline in foreign investments by gradually removing the restrictions on Jews participating in joint-stock companies.

The national conference of the German Baptist Church (“Dunkards”) in Frankfort, Indiana votes to discourage its members owning automobiles, “at least until such time as they become in general use or until we get more light on the subject.”

Headline of the Day -100: “500 Wait to Duck I.W.W. Men in River.” (The LA Times’s typically dickish headline for the same story: “They Despise Clean Water.”) To prevent the Wobblies holding a free speech demonstration in the Tarrytown, NY, Fountain Square, the locals have laid down a layer of tar one inch deep. The 500 Tarrytonians waited at the train station to give any arriving activists the traditional Tarrytown welcome of a bath in the Hudson, but none came.

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A careful balancing of weighty and diverse factors

Netanyahu is pushing a bill allowing the forcible feeding of Palestinian prisoners (there is a major hunger-strike among prisoners being held indefinitely without trial).

The government’s proposal says, “A decision on this sensitive question, which requires a careful balancing of weighty and diverse factors, should not be taken by administrative or medical officials responsible for the well-being of a prisoner on hunger strike, but should rather be made by a court of law at the appropriate level.” This is an outright admission that forcible feeding is intended not as a medical treatment, if a violent and involuntary medical treatment, but a punishment.

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Today -100: June 3, 1914: Of legal strikes, dynamite, political pacification, lepers, and mayflowers

The House of Representatives accepts an amendment to the anti-trust bill legalizing peaceful strikes, picketing, and boycotts.

Two suffragettes chain themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Others try to heckle Lloyd George in his Welsh constituency; when ejected from his outdoors meeting, they smash windows, as was the custom.

A bomb scare at the Department of Agriculture turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by the watchman who raised the alarm (and planted the very real dynamite), hoping for a reward and a better job.

Gen. Huerta informs the Niagara conference that he is willing to step down – when Mexico is “politically pacified.”

The talk of Paris is that opponents of President Raymond Poincaré are attempting to force him to resign by threatening to make public something about his wife’s personal life. I don’t know what Parisians knew, or thought they knew, at the time, and the NYT is being coy, but the Radicals, Caillaux’s supporters, were trying to track down rumors that she had bigamously married her second husband (Poincaré is her third), and had sent agents to America to look for her first husband, who they wrongly thought was still alive. In fact, they had definitely divorced. The real scandal, if the Radicals had but known it, was that while Raymond & Henriette had married in a civil ceremony in 1904, they had a secret religious ceremony in 1913, to please his parents, after her first husband died. Given Poincaré’s anti-clerical politics, that wouldn’t have looked good. France, huh?

The famous leper John Early is arrested for being a leper in Washington D.C., where he has been staying under an assumed name at the same hotel where Vice President Marshall and a bunch of senators live. He says he came to lobby on behalf of a federal leprosium (first problem: I don’t think that’s an actual word). In the two weeks since he escaped from his leper colony, he’s been to Toronto, Montreal and New York, where he took in a baseball double-header. (Update, if you can have an update to a 100-year-old story: the June 5th LA Times reports that Early’s efforts have resulted in the introduction of two bills in Congress for a national leprosarium [that’s the word; for fun, you can google the connection between James Carville and lepers]).

Although the Wilson administration had successfully suppressed the story in December, it comes out that a Navy assistant paymaster was fired for partying with two... ladies... on the presidential yacht, The Mayflower.

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Today -100: June 2, 1914: They do not seem to be aware of the fact that the Constitutionalists are conquerors

The ABC envoys tell the Constitutionalists that they’ll only be allowed to attend the Niagara conference if they have a cease-fire with the federales and agree to everything the negotiators have already decided.

The Constitutionalists respond to the conference’s proposed commission to run Mexico with a resounding, not to say contemptuous, no: “They do not seem to be aware of the fact that the Constitutionalists are conquerors, that they have inaugurated and carried almost to successful completion a revolution, and that this means the establishment of a government entitled to recognition by the rest of the world.”

The goal of the failed military mutiny against Huerta seems to have been to grab the dynamite stored at the Mexico City citadel, which Huerta intends to use to blow up city if it falls into the hands of the rebels. Swell.

Mexican government employees, told that they will be required to take up arms and go to the front, are fleeing Mexico City, hoping to get to Cuba or anywhere.

A private in the 19th Infantry, currently occupying Vera Cruz, marries a local girl. A couple of ensigns are punished for letting the couple use a Navy launch for the ceremony (so they could be married under the American flag).

The Free Speech League, an offshoot of the Wobblies, demands permits to speak in Tarrytown, NY. The village president says he will have none of the IWW’s brand of so-called free speech in Tarrytown. Leonard Abbott, president of the League, says they will fight to the finish. Tarrytown plans to turn firehoses on them, as was the custom. State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Thompkins says that the “guise of free speech” gives no men, “no professional agitators or mischief makers the right to encourage the vicious, idle, and lay to acts of violence. ... It gives no one the right to disturb the peace of the Sabbath day”.

British suffragettes burn a church in Wargrave built in 1538. The vicar, who I swear is named the Rev. Basil Batty, runs into the flames to rescue a few of the church’s ancient ornaments. A note is left: “Stop persecuting women.”

Congress agrees to exempt labor unions and farmers’ cooperatives from the new anti-trust bill, by a vote of 207-0.

Yet another French government resigns. Not for nothin’, but from the start of 1913 through the start of World War I, France had six foreign ministers.

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They’re heeeere!

The Church of England objects to a high speed rail plan because it would require the removal of three consecrated burial grounds.

Well, you certainly wouldn’t want to do that, you might be haunted by mildly perturbed Anglican ghosts, who start to mutter “Boo” under their breath but when you look at them turn away embarrassed and look around like it must have been some other incorporeal being and what is the world coming to these days.

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