Today -100: January 8, 1915: Er, what exactly disqualifies a nation from being called “civilized?”

After 3½ months of investigating, the commission appointed by the French government to look into charges of German atrocities has concluded that there have indeed been German atrocities. “We must conclude that there never has been a war against civilized nations of so savage and ferocious a character as that waged upon our soil by our implacable adversary. Pillage, outrage, burning, and murder are ordinary practices of our enemies”. And rape, lots of rape.

Germany denies arresting Cardinal Mercier. Germany totally arrested Cardinal Mercier.

Former member of the Russian Duma Shmaryah Levin, a Zionist, says 1,000 or more Jews have been massacred in Russian Poland by Poles and Cossacks. When the invading German troops were driven out, Poles told soldiers that Jews had collaborated with the Germans; thus, the massacres. Many more Jews were told to leave.

The House of Representatives has rejected the amendment excluding negro immigrants the Senate added to the immigration bill, although Rep. Joe Eagle (D-Texas) suggests that negro migration should go in the other direction, i.e., back to Africa. The amendment loses 252-75, all 75 being Democrats. The House accepts the Senate’s provisions banning chronic alcoholics and people with “constitutional psychopathic inferiority.”

Seriously, “Joe Eagle”?

Headline of the Day -100: “ONLY AMERICAN BREAD RESTRAINS BELGIANS; Without It They Would Hurl Themselves on German Bayonets, Says Palmer.” So often the problem with humanitarian aid: American charity in shipping large amounts of food to Belgium keeps the Belgians from starving, but also makes the occupation easier and cheaper for Germany.

NY Gov. Whitman “emphatically” opposes ending the death penalty.

The Federal District Court rules that Arizona’s 1914 referendum requiring businesses to employ no more than 20% foreign employees is unconstitutional. Britain and Italy had complained that the law violated their treaty rights.

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Today -100: January 7, 1915: Of child labor, Cossacks, and chorus girls

David Clark, editor of the Southern Textile Bulletin, shows up at a meeting of the National Child Labor Committee, a non-governmental reform group still in existence today, and demands to be heard. He says that children employed in North Carolina textile mills are not overworked and under-nourished, as documented in NCLC reports and the photos taken by its photographer Lewis Hine.

Why, Clark says, “I am willing to wager that the children in the mill district, boy for boy, can lick any other class of boys in America.” Also, he says it’s none of the business of people in New York and Massachusetts if 13-year-olds work in North Carolina.

Mexico: “President” Gutierrez’s regime has arrested the brother of “President” Carranza. Promises a fair trial.

NY’s new governor Charles Whitman makes his first annual message to the Legislature. He calls for the abolition of the Dept of Efficiency and Economy, which is efficient and economical of him, and the state Fire Marshal, because everyone’s forgotten all about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, I guess.

German Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg’s son, a cavalry lieutenant, is killed in Poland by some Cossacks, as was the custom.

Last year, Robert Goldman, the son of banker Henry Goldman (of Goldman, Sachs & Co.) married a chorus girl, as was the custom. Because he is 19, his father is suing for divorce on his behalf, evidently against his will, which I didn’t know was a thing. Edith, the chorus girl, is suing Henry for alienation of affections for $100,000. (Update: More details emerge when the case reaches court in March. The young Mr. Goldman met Ms. Ostend when she was performing in “The Belle of Bond Street,” which is kind of perfect. When the senior Goldman found out about the marriage, he “sent his son to a ranch in the West, where he made him work as a cowboy for $40 a month.” And it sounds like young Robert was agreeable to being divorced, after his father’s private dicks found his wife in the company of other men.)

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Today -100: January 6, 1915: Of vultures, patriotism & endurance, and propellers

There have been meetings demanding justice for Leo Frank in Chicago, New York, I believe San Francisco, and elsewhere.  Former Georgia Gov. Joseph Brown calls for him to be executed at once, saying the movement for a new trial is based solely on the fact that Frank is a Jew.  Frank responds, “When I read that tirade – unfair, cruel and untruthful - I remembered that, when Prometheus was bound to the rock it was the vulture, and not the eagle, that struck its beak into his vitals.”  That’s telling him!  (Actually, it’s a pretty strong letter, worth reading, making the case that Gov. Brown’s letter was based solely on politics.)

The Germans arrest Cardinal Mercier of Malines/Mechelen in Belgium (near Antwerp).  He’d issued a pastoral letter “Patriotism and Endurance,” saying that no obedience is owed the German occupiers.  It was read in many churches on Sunday.

Russian troops are “menacing Transylvania.”  You can write the joke as well as I can.

Transylvania, by the way, was at that time part of Hungary.

Pope Benedict has gotten warring nations to agree to an exchange of prisoners who are too injured to return to the war.

Headline of the Day -100:  “FIGHT WITH FISTS FOR AN AEROPLANE. Russians Win Bout with Germans Between Trenches — Propeller Kills German Airman.”

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Today -100: January 5, 1915: God hates a four-flusher

Evidently Romania is just waiting until the weather gets better (and the mountain passes are free of snow) before joining the war.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Supposedly, Germany is trying to conscript Belgians.

British ships bombard Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa.

Two men are contesting each other’s claim to the world’s saddest title: Oldest Man in Sussex County, New Jersey.  George Niter, 106, would seem the winner.  “I come from a family of charcoal burners, and every one of them lived to be close to 100 years.”  His first presidential vote was for Andrew Jackson.

Two negroes are lynched in Wetumpka, Alabama.

Evangelist Billy Sunday, preaching in Philadelphia, is unimpressed by his Unitarian critics, who find him “wretchedly vulgar.” He refutes this by responding with great class: “Bah for the critics! They’ll get theirs.”  The NYT says “the quality of Sunday’s arguments in the cause of religion” is exemplified by his slogan, “God hates a four-flusher.”

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Today -100: January 4, 1915: The cult of cowardice

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg says “We Germans do not cherish hate. To hate is not a German trait. The vendetta belongs to the Latin races.”  On charges of German atrocities: “Our boys are not bad boys. They do not do such things.”

Oregon Gov. Oswald West appoints Kathryn Clarke to a vacant seat in the state senate. She would be the first woman state senator in Oregon.  The attorney general says the governor doesn’t have the power to make the appointment, but either way she’ll win a special election later in the month.  The lower house will also see its first female member in the next session, Marion Towne, who was elected in November. Clarke is a Republican, Towne a Democrat.

Ghent, Belgium will raise the German extortion money in part by putting a tax on bachelors.

In an article in The Independent, Theodore Roosevelt blasts Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan for “acquiescing” in the German invasion of Belgium, a policy he calls “contemptible,” “short-sighted and timid inefficiency” and “selfish indifference to the cause of permanent and righteous peace” and “the cult of cowardice.”

Headline of the Day -100:  “Turkish Opium Dearer in London.”  War is indeed hell.

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Today -100: January 3, 1915: A scientific proposition

The Congressional commission on Indian affairs is finding that the Crows of Montana are starving on their reservation while their tribal account is being syphoned for irrigation projects that don’t benefit them, while government officials steal their land for themselves.  And 90% of them have tuberculosis.

Former President Taft (who was also governor-general of the Philippines) testifies before the Senate Committee on the Philippines that if the Philippines is given independence, it will turn into a post-apocalyptic hellscape like Mexico. He thinks the Filipinos might be ready in a generation or two – the time it would take to teach everyone in the Philippines English.  “We cannot present the Filipino people with a character. It must be acquired.”  “I am in favor of gradually extending self-government to these islands. But we have done it. Let us wait and see; let us try the experiment of waiting. The difficulty is that when you give them one thing at once they want another.  That is characteristic.”  The Democratic Party’s promises of independence, he says, only create unrest.

Thomas Edison thinks the war will last another two years.  He thinks the British are developing ships capable of withstanding torpedoes from submarines.  “The present war has taught the world that killing men in war is a scientific proposition.”

Three Americans, William Thaw, Bert Hall, and James Bache, join the French aviation corps.

The Senate passes the immigration bill, including the literacy requirement, but with an exemption for Belgian farmers, the only acknowledgment they seem to be making that the European war might change things, immigration-wise.  Immigration officials will make any immigrant over 16 read from a list of 30 to 40 ordinary words in the appropriate language (including Hebrew and Yiddish).  Vagrants and people with tuberculosis or other conditions which prevent them earning a living can be excluded.  Also, anyone who advocates the unlawful destruction of property (i.e., anarchists).

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Today -100: January 2, 1915: You sunk my battleship!

Whatever is the world coming to? New York’s first woman taxicab driver, who is named Wilma Russey, because of course she is, begins her blasphemous work. Wearing a leopard-skin hat and stole and black leather gloves and some other clothes which the NYT describes in detail, as was the custom.  To further blow 1915 minds, Miss Russey has been working for the last year as an auto mechanic.

The British battleship Formidable turns out to be not so much, sinking in the English Channel with a loss of 600 men, with 150 rescued.  It’s unknown whether it was hit by a torpedo or a mine.

Turkey will change its property laws in Palestine to allow Zionist groups to buy up to 1/3 of the province.

Booker T. Washington says there were 52 lynchings in the United States in 1914, of whom 49 were black, 3 white.  3 were women.  There were 2 in Alabama, 1 in Arkansas, 4 in Florida, 2 in Georgia, 12 each in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1 in Missouri, 1 in New Mexico, 1 in North Dakota, 1 in North Carolina, 3 in Oklahoma, 1 in Oregon, 4 in South Carolina, 1 in Tennessee and 6 in Texas.

In a rather weird charity sponsorship thing, for every rabbit people kill in Oregon, the federal government will donate 5¢ to the Belgian Relief Committee.

French President Raymond Poincaré says the war will end this year.  That’ll be nice.

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Today -100: January 1, 1915: Of literacy tests, and what Arkansas needs

Karl Liebknecht, German Social Democratic Party member of the Reichstag, sends a New Year’s message to British Socialists calling on the workers of the world to unite in a war against war.

The US Senate votes 47 to 12 to keep the literacy test in the immigration bill. An amendment to exempt religious refugees (i.e., Russian Jews) from the requirement is defeated. The Senate also votes 29 to 25 to exclude people of the “black or African race” from the country (which was introduced as a poison pill to prevent northern Republicans voting for the final bill), but votes 10-43 not to exclude Turks and East Indians.  Polygamists are excluded by a vote of 45-3.  If you’re wondering which non-Utah senator voted against that, it was William Hughes (D-NJ).  Smoot of Utah pleads for his co-religionists; he says if asked whether they believe in polygamy, they would have to say yes even if they abstain from the practice.

South Africa will introduce conscription, using the very slight threat that Salomon Maritz, whose rebellion was crushed and who fled to German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), will invade South Africa backed by German troops as an excuse to invade and annex the German colony.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Arkansas Needs $10.”  The state is broke.  Gov. Hays, who can’t afford the cost of printing his biennial message to the Legislature, is asking newspapers for $2.50 each towards the cost.

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Today -100: December 31, 1914: Happy 1915 from the Archbishop of Canterbury, now go kill some Germans

Outgoing SC governor Coleman Blease just keeps pardoning prisoners, including three who dynamited a county jail in a failed attempt to lynch a negro prisoner who was later acquitted.  In Blease’s nearly four years in office, he has pardoned 1,544 prisoners.  There are only 149 state prisoners left.

Supposedly there are anti-war riots in Vienna and Budapest.

The archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year’s letter calls for more soldiers because Jesus, or something: “The very life of the empire may depend on the response to the call for men.  I think we can say deliberately that no household or home will be acting worthily if in timidity or self-love it keeps back any of those who can loyally bear a man’s part in behalf of the land we love.”

Austria, which started this whole mess by declaring war on Serbia, has given up on military operations against Serbia in order to concentrate on fending off the Russians.

Federal troops begin a phased withdrawal from the Colorado mining strike regions.

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Today -100: December 30, 1914: Of prohibition and political prisoners

Russia expands its alcohol ban from vodka to beer and wines.  There’s a war on, you know.

Woodrow Wilson is trying to get the Mexican government (which one?) to grant amnesty to all political prisoners.  He says he doesn’t think the Gutierrez government has executed all that many people.

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Today -100: December 29, 1914: Who is the 20th Century’s greatest criminal against humanity? The answer may surprise you.

NYT Index Headline of the Day -100: “DEMAND FOR CASTOR OIL.; Germany Needs It to Lubricate ...”  I have never had less desire to click on a link, because I just don’t want to know what Germany needs to lubricate.

Austria is denying reports of anti-war demonstrations in Hungary.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: French Commander in Chief Gen. Joseph Joffre claims that a Bavarian lieutenant issued an order that all prisoners be killed.  Joffre mentions this in a general order, as a subtle hint to French soldiers to fight to the death rather than be taken prisoner.

The US complains to Britain about it interfering with American commercial shipping.

The Honduran consul-general in San Francisco is arrested for burning his house down.  I have no idea what that’s about.

US Supreme Court Justice J. R. Lamar grants Leo Frank’s appeal to be heard by the full court.

The Daily Mail claims that a pamphlet on sale in Germany proclaims King Edward VII “The Twentieth Century’s Greatest Criminal Against Humanity.”

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Today -100: December 28, 1914: When he has a couple of torpedoes in his body he will be more amenable

Pancho Villa claims he does not “intend to tolerate” any more executions by, er, his men.

Italy says that its invasion of Albania was intended solely to keep Albania independent and neutral and preserve its integrity.  There’s probably a flaw in that argument somewhere.

In the context of fending off charges that German attacks on English coastal towns violated international law, Admiral Schlieper says that if anything the Germans have been too humane, and German subs should sink everything they can.  “Germans must not allow their hereditary weakness or considerateness to slacken their firm purpose. ... We cannot bring the British lion to his knees by feeding him with cakes.  When he has a couple of torpedoes in his body he will be more amenable.”

You’re still marveling over the thing about German weakness and considerateness, aren’t you?

The US admits, after several days of rumor-filled reports in the press, that there’s a small revolt going on in the Philippines, which Governor-General Francis Harrison had been denying.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Our Indians Not Yellow.”  “Cato Sells, United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, has ruled that the American Indian is not a Mongolian” and will ban from Indian schools all books that say that they are.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Terra Haute Mayor is Weary of Jail.”  He is going to find his 3½ years at Leavenworth sooooo boring.

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And writing Shakespeare plays

North Korea calls Obama a monkey, and blames the US for shutting down its internet. Which just goes to prove what we’ve always suspected: monkeys are in charge of the internet.

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Today -100: December 27, 1914: Those v’s will get you every time

Germany is telling neutral countries that it won’t recognize their consuls in Belgium anymore, part of its slow-moving annexation.  If the US and other neutrals accept this move, they’d be effectively accepting German sovereignty over Belgium.

Headline of the Day -100 (AP story in the LA Times):  “German Spy’s Accent Sends Him to Death.”  I’m guessing this is nonsense, but the story goes that when the German army was near Paris, a German spy pretending to be a French officer got into the collection of artillery assembled to defend the city, claiming to belong to the military staff but not knowing the password and wearing a new uniform.  A suspicious French colonel had him count the artillery pieces, in ordinal rather than cardinal numbers because it’s a well-known fact that Germans can’t pronounce vingt-neuvieme, something about the v’s and the t.  So the spy was arrested and shot.

Mexico’s Provisional President Gutierrez orders everyone to stop all the summary executions.

Headline of the Day -100 (NYT Magazine):  “New Ruler of Egypt Is a Dancing Sultan.”

Most Terra Haute, Indiana officials, from Mayor Donn Roberts down, are arrested for corrupting in the November elections, including for Congress and the US Senate.  The conspiracy included repeat voting (some of the floating voters testified that they were paid to vote for Republicans in Illinois and Democrats in Indiana), infiltrating election boards, fake registrations, arresting people they didn’t want voting, all paid for with a “tax” on saloons, gambling houses, dance halls etc.  Roberts, who had been planning to spend 1916 running for governor, instead was serving a sentence for bribery in Leavenworth.

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Today -100: December 26, 1914: Feast and fight

A very Sing Sing Christmas: new warden Thomas Mott Osborne gives the prisoners a Broadway show (out of town try-outs, as it were), with the Broadway cast and even the Broadway sets, Owen Davis’s, um, “Sinners.”

A revolution begins in Albania, fomented by the Turks according to the no doubt unbiased London Daily News.  Italian troops land.

In addition to all the cigars and wine the Germans demanded of Belgians so that German soldiers could celebrate Christmas, they also asked the Belgians to make them some Christmas cakes.  The Belgians naturally replied that they couldn’t make cakes without flour (and rat poison).

Japan’s Imperial Diet votes down a bill to increase the size of the army, so the emperor dissolves it. The Imperial Diet, not the army.

Headline of the Day -100:  “British Soldiers Feast and Fight.”  We’ve all been there.

That article mentions British and German soldiers singing a hymn together in their separate trenches, but the wider story of the Christmas Truce hasn’t been reported yet.

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Today -100: December 25, 1914: We no shoot and no work today

Bird dude John Muir dies.

A Louisville, Kentucky court rules that enforcing residential racial segregation, as a recent city ordinance requires, is the rightful exercise of a police power of the state and doesn’t violate the 14th Amendment or KY’s own Bill of Rights.  The article doesn’t state exactly what the particular negro in the case, Arthur Harris, was arrested for doing.

Headline of the Day -100:  The LAT reports that the 1910 census showed that there were 71,500 Chinese in the country, and 72,000 Japanese, and gives other information about their professions and whatnot.  The headline, because it’s the LA Fucking Times, is “The Yellow Peril.”

I mentioned that the British were supplying every soldier and sailor with a plum pudding.  The French military is sending one bottle of champagne for every four soldiers, Belgium is giving its soldiers 25 cigars each.

Headline of the Day -100:  “French Girl Sacrifices Her Hair For Soldiers.”  Yvonne Pusel, a “Lorraine peasant girl,” sent her hair to Paris to be sold to buy presents for the soldiers.  Only to find that all the soldiers had sold their guns to buy her a fancy set of combs, probably.

At many places along the front lines between German and British troops, a spontaneous Christmas Truce develops, in which enemy soldiers not only didn’t shoot, but joined in singing hymns, then cautiously venturing out and greeting each other – “We no shoot and no work today” some Germans reassured them – and exchanged halting conversation, cigarettes, food, alcohol, and presents.  With all the presents from home and from drives organized by newspapers and gifts from Queen Mary and the like, the soldiers had goods to trade in unusual quantities (also actual newspapers; there is one story of a German who asked for a British paper because German ones were full of lies).  An officer who wrote one of the first published accounts, possibly the first, in the London Daily News of December 30th, was given a photo of the Crown Prince of Bavaria.  He adds, “Of course, these men were Saxons – not Prussians.”  One British soldier got a haircut from a German who had been his barber before the war in London (that may be an exaggeration).  The London Daily News account doesn’t include football, but only because the Germans considered the ground too hard to join in.  Football matches, a favorite part of the myth that grew up around these events, were actually not a feature of more than a couple of the local truces, if any (it’s not like there were a lot of balls in the trenches). In the mythical versions the score was almost always 3-2.

There were incidents of fraternization between other armies pretty much everywhere, though on a smaller scale, even the French and Germans, which tend to be less well documented (French newspapers weren’t allowed to mention them).

A letter, just come to light, by a British general (who didn’t participate in the fraternization because he thought he might be too tempting a target) says one of his men “smoked a cigar with the best shot in the German army, then not more than 18. They say he’s killed more of our men than any other 12 together but I know now where he shoots from and I hope we down him tomorrow.”

There were much more scattered truces on Christmas of 1915 and 1916, but the army brass of both sides, embarrassed by the 1914 one, ordered Xmas artillery barrages to pre-empt any repetition – and ordered sentries to shoot anyone who tried to party with the enemy.  The 1914 truces, however, were far too widespread for the participants to face any punishment.  One German soldier, a Private Hitler, fumed at other soldiers who participated, “Have you no German sense of honor?”

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It’s all about the hats

Six years ago, I wrote:

“What will a Barack Obama presidency bring? A long, long visual drought. An increasingly frustrating series of dignified poses. Sigh. Soon desperation will drive me to learn how to photoshop propeller beanies


and Queen Elizabeth’s hats




onto his head,


and he’ll still look ten times more dignified than Bush at his most dignitudinous.”

So now there’s this:



Just saying.

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Today -100: December 24, 1914: Of swaps, Christmas cards, and insurance

The Daily Telegraph claims that talks between Germany and Britain over an exchange of civilian prisoners fell apart when Germany demanded a ratio of 5 Germans for every 1 Britisher (the British have many more interned Germans than Germany has Brits).

The latest order from the British censors bans the publication of any war news that occurred in the previous five days or within 20 miles of the front.

The British king and queen are sending a Christmas card to every single soldier and sailor, because they’re just polite that way.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Daily Telegraph claims that Austria has attempted, twice, to make peace with Serbia, only to be turned down.

Oh, and Austrian Emperor Franz Josef is rumored to be dying.  Again.  Last rites are said to have been read.

The Lusitania is having to pay a near record for insurance, $50,000 (to a value of $10 million), for its return voyage from New York to Britain.  Also, one of the Lusitania’s stewards and one of its firemen are arrested after $7,500 worth of opium are discovered in their lockers, but the insurance premium probably doesn’t cover this.

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Today -100: December 23, 1914: Of generals, prohibition, potatoes, menacing Arabs, fair play, and art students

Georges Weill, a deputy in the German Reichstag for Metz (Lorraine) since 1912, who was at the café with Jean Jaurés when he was assassinated, has been “missing” since then.  Turns out, he volunteered for the French Army.  His German citizenship will be stripped from him in 1915.  When Lorraine is re-incorporated into France, he’ll be a deputy in the French parliament (1924-8).

French Commander in Chief Gen. Joseph Joffre fires 24 generals.

Rep. Richmond Hobson (D-Alabama)’s proposed prohibition amendment to the Constitution fails in the House, getting 197 votes to 189, well short of the 2/3 needed.  The voting was very much not along party lines.  The NYT calls the idea a federal usurpation of the rights of the states.

Austria bans the hoarding of potatoes, and regulates their price.

A short NYT article about French opposition to Japan sending troops to Europe to fight on the Allied side intriguingly suggests that one reason the government rejects the idea is that it is deferring to US opposition.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Arabs Menace Christians.”  In Hodeida, Arabia (now Yemen).

There is a race war going on in South Carolina near the town of...  what for it... Fair Play.  4 or 5 dead black men, 4 wounded white men, including a magistrate who is said to be dying.

Artists to the front: Of the 2,000 students at the National School of the Fine Arts in Paris at the start of the war, 1,800 have joined up. And some of the professors.  A bunch of them have died, including no one I’ve ever heard of, but perhaps would have if they’d lived.  Several prominent Futurists are in the army, which doesn’t bode well for their, well, you know, future.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Russians Care Nothing for Lodz.”

Headline of the Day -100:  “Russians Moving on Thorn.”  Sounds painful.

Romania will return most of the territory it captured from Bulgaria during the Second Balkan War.  This seems to be Romania protecting its flank for when and if it goes to war against Austria.

The Germans occupying Ghent are demanding 1 million cigars, 1 million cigarettes, and all the wine in town.  For Christmas.

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Today -100: December 22, 1914: Of bombing and lunatics

A British plane bombs what the pilot hopes were German targets in Ostend, Belgium.  I say hopes because he did it at night, the first ever night-time aerial bombing raid, if you’re keeping track of historical firsts in the killing of other humans.

Harry Thaw, murderer of architect Stanford White, is ordered by the Supreme Court to return to New York from New Hampshire to face trial for his escape from Matteawan Asylum.  Thaw might plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which to be fair is a pretty good defense to the charge of escaping from a lunatic asylum.

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