Today -100: April 18, 1915: Of bosses, dungeons, and grand dukes

The German military governor in Belgium dissolves the Belgian Red Cross for not being cooperative.

“Boss” Bill Barnes, the “boss” of the NY Republican Party, is suing Theodore Roosevelt for $50,000 in a libel suit for calling him a “boss,” which is totally a “boss” move. It will be quite the media circus. I’ll probably mostly be ignoring it.

Headlines of the Day -100:

The Great War takes a decidedly 50 Shades of Grey turn. Hope everyone remembers their safe word.

At last, European countries are talking about their war aims. Former and future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau says it is France’s mission to be invincible but dominated by humanity. And German censors are allowing the publication of op-eds in favor of annexing Belgium while suppressing op-eds opposed to it.

Black people in Boston protest  “The Birth of a Nation.” They are led by William Monroe Trotter, the activist (whose name the NYT spells wrong) last seen here being thrown out of the White House by Pres. Wilson. They wanted to protest inside the theater, but whenever a black person attempted to purchase a ticket, they were told it was sold out. It wasn’t. The police are called to clear the theater lobby. Arrests are made.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Germany claims that Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich is not so much sick, as the royal family claims, as suffering from the effects of having been shot in the stomach by Gen. Baron Sievers after the latter was summoned to explain to Nicky, the commander of Russian forces, why he’d lost a battle. Supposedly, the grand duke hit the baron, who shot him and then himself.

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Today -100: April 17, 1915: Of wasted lives, censorship, shrapnel shells, and excommunications

Headline of the Day -100:

Well, it’s refreshing to see one religious leader resist cheerleading for the war... wait, what now?

Sigh.

In censorship news, Austen Chamberlain MP (future leader of the Conservative party) says secrecy is detrimental to the war effort. But it’s the German government that takes his advice to heart, belatedly clearing for publication the news from last July that Russia is mobilizing its troops. Berlin newspaper readers must be wondering if some sort of war might develop out of that. “Ought we to be concerned?” they must be saying to themselves.

The American Locomotive Company of Schenectady is making a deal with Russia to supply $65 million worth of shrapnel shells.

The pope lifts the excommunication of Bulgarian King Ferdinand, which was imposed because his son the crown prince, his son mind you, converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Today -100: April 16, 1915: Written by the old

The latest atrocity charges are contained in an Austrian “Red Book” accusing Britain, France, Russia and Serbia of war crimes.  One section accuses the first three countries of bringing “uncultured and barbaric troops” (meaning Indians, Senegalese and other non-European colonials) to Europe and letting them commit uncultured and barbaric acts. Also, Serbian women and children are said to have tortured wounded Austrian prisoners. Plus the usual fictional atrocities (“in one case Serbian civilians cut off the forearms and legs below the knees of a Hungarian hussar and placed him on a horse, which was chased round amid the applause of the people”).

Killed in action: Lt. William Glynne Charles Gladstone. He was 29, and had been a Liberal MP since he was 26. Shot by a sniper in France, as was the custom. His father, grandfather (Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone) and great-grandfather were all MPs; he was the last parliamentary Gladstone. His uncle Herbert Gladstone, another MP and home secretary, will write a memoir of him in 1918. Here is the first line of the The Spectator’s review: “It is one of the strange features of the war that, by a tragic inversion, the Lives of the young should have to be written by the old.”

Headline of the Day -100:

Well, whatever floats your boat, or in this case...  The Katwijk, a government-owned ship, was carrying corn from Baltimore to Rotterdam.

A bill to legalize professional baseball games on Sundays fails in the New York State Assembly. Assemblyman Arthur McElroy, the sponsor, says he will try again. “It’s sunshine, outdoors and peanuts against dives, gambling and vice.”

Former Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta says the only thing that can save Mexico is not an outlaw but a strong Mexican. Which strong Mexican, he is too modest to say. Honestly, you’d think Mexico would have had enough of strong Mexicans by now, including all 823 self-proclaimed presidents of the republic.

Huerta also says he had nothing to do with the murder of President Madero, and someday the real culprit will be known. He could say, but it’s a “soldier’s secret.” Whatever that means.

Germany claims that public buildings in Paris are being used as military observation posts. Paris denies this, and thinks Germany is laying the ground-work for zeppelin attacks on, for example, the Louvre.

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Today -100: April 15, 1915: I think President Lincoln wouldn’t like this play

Headline of the Day -100:

At the Liberty Theatre in New York City. Several negroes protested, yelling variously that the film was a libel on the negro race, that it was inappropriate on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and, indeed, that “I think President Lincoln wouldn’t like this play.”

By the way, in describing the scene at which the eggs were thrown, that article demonstrates that the “spoiler alert” had not been invented yet. Also that the protesters patiently watched the movie for more than two hours before that eminently protest-worthy scene arrived.

Dr. Harry Plotz of Mt. Sinai, who is 24, announces that he has discovered the typhus bacillus and developed a vaccine. So a rather unamusing disease is caused by the rather amusingly named Plotz bacillus.

The Women’s Social and Political Union’s newspaper The Suffragette appears for the first time since the start of the war, mostly, it seems, to carry on Mrs Pankhurst’s campaign against the Hague International Women’s Peace Congress. She says the British delegation won’t be representative because the WSPU won’t be sending anyone, nor will the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (which is seriously split over the war). The Suffragette notes that Russia has no peace movement at all, not even a women’s peace group: “The Russian women know that the very idea that we want peace heartens the German, prolongs the war, and causes more death and destruction.”

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Today -100: April 14, 1915: That is enough of neutrality

Headline of the Day -100:

“This is a measure which is usually adopted on the eve of war.”

Speaking of dull scabbards, the pope will definitely be on Italy’s side if and when it enters the war, according to the Daily Mail (UK), the news leader in bullshit.

It reports that a bishop told Pope Benedict that priests in Italy near the Austrian border were preaching to soldiers that they should prepare themselves to fight bravely, and should really be told to stop that because it violated the spirit of neutrality. “No, no, that is enough of neutrality,” the pope supposedly said. “Why, we are all Italians and must speak to our soldiers with an Italian heart.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

Something to look forward to. A bunch of new zeppelins will be built by then. Also, says the military-secrets-leaking secretary, “We shall employ a new process causing atmospheric perturbations, which will make it impossible for enemy machines to cross the German lines without dropping like flies.” No idea what he’s talking about.

“Darkie” dialect in the always racially sensitive LA Times:

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Today -100: April 13, 1915: War is inevitable

Italy’s former alliterative Prime Minister (4 times, and he’s not done yet) Giovanni Giolitti says that Italy’s entry into the war, which he opposes, is now inevitable.

Germany retaliates against British POWs for the treatment by Britain of German submarine crews. They picked out soldiers and officers from prominent families.

Thomas Edison is equipping US submarines with apparatuses allowing them to remain submerged for 100 days without poisoning the crew with chlorine gas from their batteries.

Former Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta arrives in New York. At the pier a messenger boy hands him a box. After he gets to his hotel, the Ansonia, he decides that it looks kind of like a bomb. He calls the reception desk and they send up the hotel dick, who agrees that it looks kind of like a bomb, and sends for an explosives expert and explorer, Russell Hastings Millward who happens to be staying at the hotel. Millward agrees that it looks kind of like a bomb and wants to open the box and see, but Huerta stops him. The box is taken to a police station, where Inspector Dwyer agrees that it looks kind of like a bomb. Millward opens it up anyway and it turns out to be a roll of writing by some crazy person.

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Today -100: April 12, 1915: Of national programs, grand duchesses, neutrality, and barks

Bulgarian Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov says there is a new situation in the war, and Bulgaria will soon abandon neutrality “to realize its national program.”

The “daughter of the Tsar” who recently inspected a hospital is actually the 16-year-old daughter of a fruit dealer. She charmed everyone by being quite down-to-earth for a, you know, princess. In a few years, the real grand duchess would no doubt be quite willing to be mistaken for the daughter of a fruit dealer.

A fight between striking fur finishers and scabs in Newark, NJ results in the deaths of two of the strikers. The strikers were mostly Russians, the strike-breakers Greeks.

The German ambassador to the United States, Count von Bernstorff, makes public a memorandum he sent the US government complaining about it allowing sales of munitions to the Allies while not protecting food shipments to Germany from British seizure. It’s almost like he thinks Wilson isn’t being as neutral as he proclaims himself. Bernstorff explains that, yes, Germany did sell arms to belligerents during the Balkan Wars, but that was totally different, because someone would have sold arms to those countries, but in this war, every country that manufactures arms is already at war, except the US. The US is rather annoyed that Bernstorff leaked his memo to the press.

The French newspaper Temps reported that before the war started an artist’s model prophesied that it would begin on August 2nd and end 5/22/15 and that he would be murdered in November – and he was! The Journal des Débats reports that the Virgin Mary appeared to a 7-year-old girl on Palm Sunday, telling her that her father had been wounded and the news would arrive in 3 days, then she would die (the girl, not the Virgin Mary), and the war would end in May – and the news did come and the girl did drop dead!

Weird Nautical Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: April 11, 1915: The chase for the almighty dollar has come to a halt

In a “private” letter that somehow sees its way into print, Theodore Roosevelt denounces pacifists as a “menace to the future welfare of the United States.” He calls a peace society “silly and base,” and says many pacifists are really just cowards who “like to hide their fear behind high-sounding words.”

Headline of the Day -100:

He tells the YMCA in Yonkers, “The chase for the almighty dollar has come to a halt. We are living, I am glad to say, at a time when the fraternal spirit and the brotherhood of man is spreading.” Um, yay?

Your Circus-Folk Vocabulary Word of the Day -100: zingzing - someone whose antecedents in the circus world are so feeble that they stretch back less than 100 years.

The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage issues a statement that Socialism is behind the upcoming proposed suffrage amendment to the state constitution. 

The Sunday NYT Magazine is filled with stories about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Lincoln.

I ordinarily ignore the automotive pages of the Sunday New York Times, but um...

This design is Italian, because of course it is. Designed, in fact, by a Count Marco Ricotti.

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Today -100: April 10, 1915: Wisdom’s flame springs from your cannon

Harvard student C. Huntington Jacobs wins a Harvard prize for, I guess, best war poem, “Gott Mit Uns.” Here it is, in all its glory:

Imagine how bad the poems that didn’t win must have been.

Germany complains that the US’s response to the British blockade of Germany was so anemic that it amounts to taking sides with the Allies. It further complains about all the arms sales from the US to the Allies. They’ve got a point.

Britain complains to Germany over its treatment of British POWs.

Another British response to German submarine warfare: confiscating German mail from Italian ships.

The State Dept refuses to issue a passport for Jack Johnson, because he is a fugitive from what is laughingly called justice.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The London Daily News claims that German troops have been sent into Hungary not to fight off the Russians but to prevent the Hungarians from revolting.

Mexico’s former dictator Victoriano Huerta says his return to the Western Hemisphere is just a “pleasure trip.”

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Today -100: April 9, 1915: Of salvarsan and tugboats

France and Britain are now manufacturing salvarsan, which they had been importing from Germany. Salvarsan was used in the treatment of syphilis and, well, there’s a war on...

Collector of the Port of New York Dudley Field Malone says those tugboats being hired to illegally supply British warships was actually a plot, just like the Providence Journal said 2 days ago, by a detective agency probably employed by the German embassy to make it look like Britain was violating Pres. Wilson’s neutrality policy. Malone isn’t quite prepared to admit he was made a fool of, though.

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Today -100: April 8, 1915: Dying with ecstacy and suffering with happiness

Headline of the Day -100:

William Jennings Bryan wants the Democratic Party to take the prohibitionist side wherever prohibition is a political issue, because “it cannot ally itself with the liquor interests without losing its moral standing.”

Emmeline Pankhurst condemns the International Women’s Peace Congress which will be held at the Hague later this month. And her daughter Sylvia for supporting it. She says the whole thing is a German plot.

Unlikely Headline of the Day -100:  

According to Henri Jules-Bois (author of Satanism and Magic), giving a talk in New York City, “The French on the battlefields are dying with ecstacy; in the hospitals they are suffering with happiness.”

A bill to abolish the death penalty passes the New Jersey Senate 11-1 but fails in the lower house 29-20.

George Llewellyn Davies, the adopted son of J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan), is killed in action.

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Today -100: April 7, 1915: The crooks had better move out of Chicago

Belgium’s Prince Leopold, joins the army. He’s 13½.

Headline of the Day -100 (Chicago Daily Tribune):

Big Bill Thompson is elected mayor of Chicago in a landslide. The last ever Republican mayor of Chicago. It will not go well. “The crooks had better move out of Chicago before I am inaugurated,” he says. “Because that’s my job now,” he doesn’t add, but should have. Republicans also sweep the city council, including Oscar DePriest, the first black person ever elected to the city council, which will lead to a graft trial, as is the custom in Chicago. Defended by Clarence Darrow, he was acquitted. DePriest was a US congressman 1929-35, the first African-American elected to Congress in the 20th century.

Women, whose votes were counted separately, voted exactly the same way as the men.

German-Americans tried to make the mayoral race about the war, saying that a vote for Robert Sweitzer (whose grandparents immigrated from Baden) would “save the Fatherland.” Also, Sweitzer is Catholic and Thompson Protestant, which was the cause of some debate and indeed rioting, as was the custom.

Ambrose Bierce turns out not, in fact, to have enlisted in the British army, and is still missing.

France claims to have caught three German submarines in nets.

The Providence Journal says Collector of the Port of New York Dudley Field Malone’s investigation of tugboats supplying British warships (which the British consul-general denies and which officials other than Malone aren’t even sure is illegal because Congress endorsed Wilson’s neutrality proclamation but didn’t make any provision for enforcement) was spurred by intel given him by German Naval Attaché Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, the not-so-secret head of the German sabotage campaign in the US & Canada. Malone denies this.

Terre Haute, Indiana Mayor Donn Roberts is convicted for election conspiracy.

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Today -100: April 6, 1915: Every white man should be happy

Headline of the Day -100:

A ship, not the actual Napoleonic War admiral.

The US demands $228,059.54 in compensation from Germany for the sinking of the William P. Frye (a ship, not the actual United States senator) in January.

Jess Willard knocks out Jack Johnson in the 26th round. Billy Sunday says “Every white man should be happy.” The US has sent secret service agents to Havana to try to arrest Johnson.

The US’s letters of protest to Britain and Germany over their respective naval blockades of each other are made public. Basically, the US insists on a right to sell stuff to belligerent countries, which should be respected by both sides, because making money is more important than their silly little spat.

Germany officially denies that the crew of the U-28 laughed as passengers from the Falaba drowned. It also blames merchant ships like the Falaba for attacking innocent U-boats, claiming that merchants are now under orders to ram U-boats, which are just delicate things so torpedoing ships is really just self-defense.

Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York, says there is a widespread conspiracy to violate Wilson’s neutrality proclamation by tugboats supplying British warships beyond the 3-mile limit with fuel and food. Malone has been darting up and down the New York and New Jersey docks for weeks in a torpedo boat investigating and having a fine old time.

The US Commission on Industrial Relations is looking into the working conditions of sleeping car porters and conductors. The general manager of the Pullman Company, L.S. Hungerford – which is exactly the name the general manager of the Pullman Company would have in a 1930s movie – is asked whether $27.50 a month is really enough pay for a porter. “We can get all the men we want at that rate,” the capitalist pig replied. Out of that (plus tips), the porters have to buy their uniforms in their first year of service (a mere $36.50) and their own shoe polish, and they’re fined when passengers steal the linens. And their work day seems to start at 3 a.m. and end at 11 or 12 at night.

A Capt. Edouard Anselme Jean Herail of the 11th Regiment of French Hussars is about to undergo court-martial. Last November, his overly devoted wife joined him where he was stationed. His superiors ordered him to get his wife to go back to Paris. She refused, and he faced being disciplined, so naturally he shot her. Spoiler alert: he will be acquitted.

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Today -100: April 5, 1915: Of bribes, falabas, dye, pencil cases, and spats & hats

Prince Bernhard von Bülow, the former foreign minister and chancellor of Germany who is now ambassador to Italy, is trying to mediate between Austria and Italy to keep Italy out of the war. Austria has been saying it’s willing to cede territory (no it’s not, or at least the emperor is not) but that in order to assure Italy’s continued neutrality it would only hand it over after the war is victoriously concluded. Von Bülow is suggesting a compromise by which Switzerland would occupy the territory until the war is over. I don’t think anyone’s asked Switzerland what they think about this. (A version of this proposal later in the month would have the Pope rather than Switzerland do it, although again I don’t think anyone asked the pope first).

The London Morning Post claims there was much celebrating in Germany over the sinking of the Falaba, but that the German censors banned mention of it because it would look bad to the neutral countries.

The archbishop of Canterbury agrees with the king that British workers should really stop drinking. Independent Labour Party leaders Keir Hardie and Fred Jowett call this dissing of working class drinking habits insulting.

The New York constitutional convention opens tomorrow. Lawyers want imprisonment for debt abolished.

Thomas Edison is getting into the dye business, to take advantage of the disruption to German trade.

Thomas Crozier, foreman of a lumber company in New Jersey, wants to get bail so he can attend Billy Sunday’s services (he made the sawdust for Sunday’s tabernacle) after he shot a black man. He doesn’t get it.

Queen Mary will give every man in the Royal Navy a pencil case made out of a used cartridge.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: April 4, 1915: Of peaces, libel, election riots, and critics

Austria denies those stories that it’s seeking a separate peace with Russia.

A priest in Metuchen, NJ swears out warrants against 94 (102 in a later story) of his congregation for criminal libel. Some dispute over a duck dinner of which Father Csimadia (Csmadia in the later version) disapproved (the later story says he may have disapproved in sermons but at the actual duck dinner he got roaring drunk, started singing and hitting people in the street, according to the petition his congregants sent to the bishop. It is the petition that is supposedly libelous.

Election riots in Chicago, as was the custom. Women participated, because they have the vote now, and also the legal right to riot, because feminism, probably.

NYT theatre critic Alexander Woollcott gets an injunction stopping the Shuberts excluding him from their theaters. Last month they put ads advising theater-goers to ignore the critics’ reviews of the German farce “Taking Chances” in the same issues in which those reviews appeared.  In other words they took out the ad before they’d seen the reviews. And indeed Woollcott wrote that the play “is not vastly amusing.” So they issued the ban and he went to court. He was therefore able to review “Trilby” (the Svengali story), which he finds “well worth going to see – even if you have to get in by the aid of an injunction.”

Woollcott’s lawyers will argue before the NY Supreme Court that the Shuberts’ banishment of him amounted to an invasion of his civil rights as a critic and a citizen. The Shuberts will respond that they don’t hate all critics, just Woollcott, who has it in for them, with “rancor and malice and venom.” They’ll quote his reviews of their productions – “The White Feather” was “funny without meaning to be,” “Apartment 12-K” “is quite vacant,” etc. Woollcott’s lawyers read out reviews by other reviewers to show that those plays were just crap. The Court will decide in 1916 that the state Civil Rights Act applied only to discrimination based on race, creed or color, not profession or dickishness.

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Today -100: April 3, 1915: Of zeppelin failures, daring Lusitanias, offenders against the law of nations and common humanity, colon riots, and wiener dogs

Headline of the Day -100:

Germans really want London to be bombed (according to an anonymous source in the London Times).

Headline of the Day -100:  

Germany hears that Britain is keeping captured submarine crews segregated from other POWs. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey says that those crews were engaged in sinking innocent merchant ships and killing non-combatants, so they can’t be considered honorable opponents but rather as “offenders against the law of nations and common humanity.” Germany threatens that if those prisoners receive worse treatment than other captives, one British POW will also receive harsh treatment for every German submariner POW.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The British press claims that there is a reign of terror in Austria-Hungary, especially Prague, with ordinary citizens who make even slightly critical remarks about the war being arrested. Also, Czech troops are said to be in mutiny.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Those are the worst kinds.  The soldier, who was drunk, got into a fight with a Panamanian cop, who shot him. The LA Times calls it a “race riot,” without offering any details that suggest race was a factor.

The West Virginia Legislature adjourns without appropriating funds for the government. So the governor isn’t getting his salary, schools are closed, and if I’m reading the story correctly, there aren’t funds to pay for the Legislature to come back and pass the appropriation bills.

The daughter of Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in December 1913, never to be seen again, receives a (fake) letter from him. Fake Ambrose Bierce is supposedly in England (or France) right now, working for Lord Kitchener.

A writer (or possibly a letter) in the Daily Mail (UK) complains about the “cruel and senseless manner” in which people are now treating dachshunds in Britain because of the German name (yeah, this was a real thing). The writer claims that dachshunds, rather than being German, are good old-fashioned English turnspit dogs. I happen to know from an episode of QI that turnspit dogs were extinct, but nice try.

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Today -100: April 2, 1915: Of separate peaces, German horse breeding, and visiting dictators

Chicago elections this year will be on Passover, but the Election Board will allow clerks to mark Orthodox Jews’ ballots for them.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Austria is begging to make a separate peace.

Evidently not only is the food of the German people being rationed, so is that of German horses. But exceptions will be made for the oats of racing horses so that racing meets can go on, not for the amusement of the public but for “the serious and important purposes of German horse breeding”.

Woodrow Wilson will attempt to prevent Victoriano Huerta from returning to Mexico from the United States.

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Today -100: April 1, 1915: Of zebras. What more do you need?

With the British talking about restricting alcohol sales to boost productivity by munitions workers, King George “has volunteered, if it is considered advisable, personally to give up the use of all alcoholic liquors and to issue an order against their use in the royal households.” Which would certainly boost the king’s productivity, if he actually produced something. The problem is that it would look bad if the government enacted measures solely aimed at the working class. The other problem is that the productivity problem is partly caused by workers wanting more pay if they’re going to work longer and harder while the profits of the companies they labor for go up and up.

Former Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta is sailing from Spain to Cuba. Is he planning to lead a new uprising?

A prohibition bill fails in the New York State Assembly, 54-48.

The NY Assembly  passes an exemption to state factory laws, allowing canning plants to employ women and children for 72 hours a week. At the conclusion of the vote, Minority Leader Al Smith says, “If you Republicans stay in power long enough you’ll tear down the whole law that protects New York’s most valuable asset - its womanhood.” A bill to allow women and children to work until midnight in canning factories fails by a single vote, and a bill to allow them to work on Sundays also loses.

Britain is facing a revolt on the north-west frontier of India.

The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage finally splits formally from the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. Focused on a national rather than state-by-state campaign, it will be younger and more radical in its methods than the rather stale NAWSA, following the example of the militants in Britain, with whom some CU leaders (Lucy Burns, Alice Paul, Rheta Childe Dorr) worked. At the CU’s organizing meeting there is some debate over whether men should be allowed to join. They won’t be.

The first Baron Rothschild dies at 74. Nathan R. headed the British branch of the banking family, was president of the British Red Cross Society, and was the first professing Jew to enter the House of Lords, in 1885, when he was made a baron; he was already an Austrian baron.

The new double Baron, Walter, was a crap banker so the family allowed him to step down so he could spend more time with animals. He likes animals. A lot. And Zionism.

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Today -100: March 31, 1915: In which is revealed the most shocking crime of the war

Headline of the Day -100:

That’s Leon Thrasher, 31, the first American killed in World War I. A mining engineer from Massachusetts who worked in British West Africa (Ghana), drowned when that U-boat sank the Falaba. His corpse will wash ashore in Ireland in 3½ months.

The NYT thinks “The sinking of the Falaba is perhaps the most shocking crime of the war.”

Pres. Wilson’s daughter (but which one?) has a stalker. Who has just been committed for the second time.

Turkey promises to protect Christians from further massacres in Urumiah, Persia.

Businesses on Broadway in New York City will sue to prevent the Broadway Subway, now under construction, from ventilating its tunnels through street gratings that would send hot smelly fumes into the area above and up Marilyn Monroe’s dress.

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Today -100: March 30, 1915: We are fighting Germany, Austria, and drink

A German sub sinks the British liner RMS Falaba in St George’s Channel (between Ireland and Wales). The sub surfaced, gave the ship 5 minutes to load everyone into lifeboats – which wasn’t enough time – then torpedoed it (it may have resorted to torpedoes so quickly  because the Falaba was trying to wireless for help). 104 of the 240 crew and passengers aboard the Falaba died, including... well, tune in tomorrow. One survivor of the Falaba “distinctly saw the crew on the deck of the submarine laughing.” The Falaba blowed up real good because it was carrying contraband explosives, as the Lusitania would be doing in a little bit.

Not that torpedoing a ship and detonating explosives in it is always a good thing: the U-boat that sank the Falaba, the U-28, will sink in 2½ years when it detonates ammunition on the Olive Branch, which hurls a lorry into the air – right onto the U-28.

An English passenger had a camera, and put those 5 minutes to good use before jumping into the sea, where he floated an hour before being rescued.

The Daily Telegraph calls the Germans “an enemy without bowels of compassion for the defenseless and the weak and without respect for any law except his own necessity.”

Bowels of compassion?

British Chancellor David Lloyd George is threatening to ban booze: “We are fighting Germany, Austria, and drink, and, so far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.” Unpatriotic boozing workers in shipyards and munition plants are being blamed for the inability to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of shells and whatnot being thrown at the Germans, because no one will admit out loud that Secretary of War Kitchener is just not very good at admin.

One of the pretenders to the defunct French throne, Philippe the Duke of Orléans (to add insult to other insult, the NYT refers to him as the Legitimist heir, mistaking him for a different non-king from a different line, the one thrown out by a revolution in 1830 as opposed to the one thrown out by a revolution in 1848), was rejected when he tried to join the French Army, and then was rejected in turn by the British, Russian and even Belgian armies. Now his request to join the French Foreign Legion under a fake name (as was the custom) has been rejected.

The Allies are claiming that Germany has plenty of food, and all that moaning is just put on to arouse world feeling against England. This assertion is supported by an unnamed “neutral diplomat,” who adds the interesting detail that the average man on the straße in Germany thinks that after Germany defeats Russia (in a couple of months, of course) and France (soon after), France will be bought off with half of Belgium and join Germany in fighting Britain.

Prominent Republicans are considering whether they can nominate Elihu Root for president in 1916 without Roosevelt shitting all over him.

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