Today -100: July 11, 1915: Of marines, hurt Germans, bankers, and gravity

US Marines land in Haiti, as is the custom, to protect American property from the fighting.

Jane Addams says the people of Europe are tired of the war, but the governments of Europe aren’t. But “citizens of all the warring nations use the same phrases in speaking of the righteousness of their cause, and the unrighteousness of that of their antagonists.” She says Germans are angry about the US selling supplies and ammunition to the Allies, but are more hurt by it.

Carranza’s forces capture Mexico City. Again. Or say they have.

Daniel LeRoy Dresser, who was president of the Trust Company of the Republic until it collapsed in 1903, commits suicide. He’d been trying to start a company to manufacture a steam generator he has a patent for, but was unable to get financing.

Thomas Jefferson Jackson See, an astronomer on Mare Island, says he has worked out how gravity works. It’s an electrical phenomenon that works at the speed of light. So that settles that.

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Today -100: July 10, 1915: Make up your minds, and do so quickly

German forces in South West Africa surrender unconditionally to South African Gen. Louis Botha. South Africa has a colony now (or League of Nations mandate or whatever).

At a public meeting in London, Secretary of War/Field Marshal/Lord Kitchener (but he’d rather direct) calls for volunteers, or as he put it, “still larger reserves to make good the wastage at the front.” Stirring rhetoric, that. He especially appeals to shirkers (a word dating from 1914, at least with this meaning) and to people who claim their work is indispensable but can really be replaced by physically unfit men or women.

(Whoops, just noticed that the part of the quote I used as post title, "Make up your minds, and do so quickly," isn't in the poster.)

Germany finally responds to Woodrow Wilson’s Lusitania note, after some semi-public negotiations about its contents. There’s a lot of the usual about how Germany’s submarine warfare is purely a defensive response to the actions of Perfidious Albion, and a claim that all those Lusitania passengers, or at least more of them, wouldn’t have died if the Lusi hadn’t unexpectedly blown up after being hit with that torpedo, probably from munitions. Germany reassures Wilson that US ships not carrying contraband are perfectly safe – provided they’re marked and that Germany is informed of their names and schedule and the US government certifies that they’re not carrying munitions.  In effect, this would mean the US informing it which ships leaving US harbors it’s ok to sink and when it can expect them. Obviously a non-starter. Germany would also like more passenger ships to be under US or other neutral flags, so it can sink ships with British flags without worrying about killing too many US citizens.

The Minnehaha limps into port in Halifax. It’s been on fire for two days since Frank Holt/Erich Muenter’s bomb exploded. The fire-extinguishing efforts were hampered, we will hear when the ship finally makes it back to the US, by fumes arising when the flames reached a shipment of rum. The Atlantic Transport Line will generously give the crew a bonus of two weeks’ wages.

Jane Addams, back from Europe, gives a speech about the women’s peace congress and her tour of Europe. But what’ll gain the most attention is her claim that soldiers of all the warring nations are so unwilling to kill that their superiors have to get them liquored up before battles.

Four men are arrested for the murder of a cattleman and his son in Iowa 47 years ago. They’re also said to have buried $90,000 in “treasure” somewhere in Iowa and then lost the map. The James gang heard about the buried treasure and Frank James searched for it himself, but never found it.

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Today -100: July 9, 1915: Of minnehahas, reindeer, and curing bad boys

Frank Holt/Erich Muenter strikes again: There’s an explosion at sea on the SS Minnehaha, which is bound for Europe carrying munitions – rather a lot of munitions – although the package with the bomb, which shipped as freight, was placed in a separate hold from the ammunition and so failed to set it off. The Minnehaha brown-trousers it towards Halifax, still ablaze. No further message has been received from the ship, but its owners, International Mercantile Marine, claim not to be worried because there are no passengers whose families would need to be reassured. Presumably the Minnehaha is crewed entirely by orphans like in the Pirates of Penzance. Or maybe robots.

The constable who arrested Muenter is going to try to claim the $1,000 reward offered for his capture in 1906 after he murdered his wife.

Headline of the Day -100:

Medical Breakthrough of the Day -100:

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Today -100: July 8, 1915: One shell, two shell, red shell, blue shell...

Prison authorities discover that Frank Holt/Erich Muenter wrote to his wife that he put bombs on several ships carrying munitions to Europe with really long timers on their fuses. Since at least 60 of his sticks of dynamite have not been recovered, this seems plausible, so ships are radioed at sea and are searched, but nothing. Spoiler alert: they searched the wrong ships.

South Australia appoints women judges, the first in the British Empire. One is the widow of South Australian Prime Minister Thomas Price.

Bullshit Headline of the Day -100: 

The king of Italy visited the front; the Austrians supposedly knew he was there from a spy and tried to kill him. The article fails to say how many shells were in fact fired, or what they cost.

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Today -100: July 7, 1915: Goodbye, bomby shooty anti-war guy, we hardly knew ye

Frank Holt/Erich Muenter commits suicide by jumping from the top of a cell door head-first onto concrete. The guard who was supposed to be watching him (and maybe keeping that door closed) because he’d already tried to kill himself once, trying to slit his writs with the metal part of a pencil, claims it’s not his fault because he totally heard an explosion, proving that Holt’s head injuries must have come from detonating one of his fulminate of mercury caps which had eluded detection for several days, between his teeth. Anyway, Holt had been getting crazier and crazier under the third degree, but the precipitating factor in his suicide was that his identity as the Harvard poisoner was on the verge of being conclusively proved.

The cops have found some but not all of the rather large quantity of dynamite Holt/Muenter had purchased. Some of it may be heard from soon.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Novoe Vremya newspaper says Germans burned a large number of wounded Russian soldiers, along with their medical personnel. German planes are said to have dropped leaflets explaining that they did it to prevent the spread of infection, and to teach the Russians not to leave their sick and wounded behind.

Similarly, Austrian planes are dropping propaganda leaflets on the Italians, which I guess is an innovation of this war.

Dr. Isadore Kitsee says the German embassy has gotten hold of a code system for use in circumventing US censorship of wireless messages.

Former Mexican Dictator Huerta refuses to give bond unless the US promises not to keep watch on him to prevent him going over the border like Orozco.

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Today -100: July 6, 1915: Of pipes, bombs, and booze

Headline of the Day -100:

Tomorrow the Times will report not only that J.P. smoked, but also that he shaved.

“Frank Holt” is denying being Erich Muenter. Authorities have brought in someone who used to know Muenter to identify him, but Holt’s too banged up for him to be sure.

A bomb explodes at NYPD headquarters. No one is hurt. Suspicion falls on Frank Holt, just on general principles.

The American Temperance Life Insurance Association of New York goes bust. The problem: they expanded their client base from total abstainers to moderate drinkers, increasing the death rate. The company’s president was Frank Delano. Some relation of FDR?

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Today -100: July 5, 1915: Of trick matches and surrenders

Frank Holt/Erich Muenter now says his plan was to hold J. P. Morgan’s wife and children hostage while J. P. induced manufacturers to stop exporting arms and ammunition to Europe. “The dynamiter declared he had thought out the problem most thoroughly and that the war would cease when the export of arms ended.” Under the 3rd degree and deprived of sleep, Muenter isn’t giving the same story twice, and looks increasingly batshit crazy. The authorities are still trying to work out if Holt and Muenter are the same person – and don’t seem to have asked him yet – and what sort of matches he used in the Capitol Building bombing. And, oh yeah, where he got all that dynamite.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The London Daily Chronicle reports that German troops in Gallipoli are shooting any Turks who look like they might surrender to the Allies.

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Today -100: July 4, 1915: This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace

J. P. Morgan Jr. is shot twice by one “Frank Holt,” a teacher of German at Cornell. The corpulent banker will be okay, though.

It was “Holt” who set that bomb in the Capitol Building. In a letter to several Washington papers under the nom de boom “R. Pearce,” he explains that he placed the bomb because he opposes the US selling munitions to the Allies: “This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace.”

Then he placed another bomb... well, no spoilers... then he trained it to J. P. Morgan’s Long Island mansion. Morgan is helping finance the Allied war effort, so “Holt” planned to convince him to stop doing that, only, after “Holt” forced his way past the butler by brandishing two revolvers, Junior impolitely refused to engage in a friendly dialogue about the war and munitions and current events and instead rushed him, so “Holt” shot him twice in the groin. He was then brought down by Morgan, Morgan’s wife Jane, and a butler, who brained him with a lump of coal. He was then tied up by the servants and, just to class this whole scene up a bit, the British ambassador.

Holt is actually Erich Muenter (which authorities are already beginning to piece together). He was born in Germany in 1871 and emigrated to the US in the ‘90s. He taught German at the University of Kansas and then at Harvard until he took a... sudden sabbatical... in 1906 after killing his wife, who died 10 days after giving birth from slow poisoning by arsenic (yes, he was poisoning her while she was pregnant). Muenter shaved his beard, changed his name to Frank Holt, remarried, had two more kids (the two from his unfortunate first marriage staying with their grandparents), and started working his way up the academic food chain again, teaching at the University of Oklahoma, Emory, and Vanderbilt and getting a PhD at Cornell (his dissertation: “The Effect of the Works of Shakespeare on German and French Literature”). He would have moved on from Cornell to Southern Methodist University in the fall, as head of the just-opened university’s German department, presumably because at SMU he would be less likely to run into someone who knew him at Harvard – he once had to take several days off when a Harvard German professor came to lecture at Cornell.

The America’s Cup yacht race is almost halted out of respect for Morgan, but he sends word that the show must go on.

Francisco Lagos Cházaro formally takes over as President of Mexico. No one pays much attention.

Meanwhile, Huerta’s co-conspirator Gen. Pascual Orozco, supposedly under close observation by soldiers and Justice Dept agents in El Paso, escapes and crosses into Mexico. Huerta is re-arrested.

Sing Sing’s Warden Thomas Osborne tells a meeting of prison reformers that he won’t be forced out (he will totally be forced out). He says before he arrived, “The old system was rotten from top to bottom.” The keepers went about the prison with bottles of whiskey over their necks and fed it to paying prisoners through a rubber tube stuck between the bars of their cells. “There was corruption all around them, and there was no possible chance of a man leaving a prison of this kind without being more corrupted than when he came in.” He more or less accuses Superintendent of Prisons John Riley of being part of the old “grafting ring.”

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Today -100: July 3, 1915: Of infernal machines, autocratic but helpful dictators, prisoners, and horns

A bomb or infernal machine explodes in the Senate wing of the Capitol Building around midnight. Details and lots more mayhem tomorrow.

Former Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz dies in exile in Paris at 84. In addition to that hagiographic obit, the NYT runs an editorial that refers to his “autocratic but helpful rule”.

NY Superintendent of Prisons John Riley is systematically undermining the reformist warden of Sing Sing Thomas Osborne, most notably by randomly transferring prisoners from Sing Sing to Auburn, undermining Osborne’s system of rewards for good behavior. One prisoner attempted suicide when told he was being transferred. (Riley defends himself tomorrow, saying that he acted after Osborne failed to answer his letters, and because Sing Sing was becoming increasingly overcrowded and there’s a freshly built prison that can take the overflow.)

Yesterday, the NYT ran a letter from a Mr. Gridley Adams about the need for automobilists (is the term autoist going out of fashion?) to provide their vehicles with a really loud horn – and not those rubber things that people ignore because vaudeville has just made them funny – and honk it at every intersection or when approaching people riding bikes or motorcycles.  Today the Times disputes the notion that everyone needs to get out of the way of a car simply because it announces its presence with an imperious honk.

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Today -100: July 2, 1915: Of Admiralty business, war babies, and blackmail

Headline of the Day -100:

Britain announces that the Armenian was “engaged in Admiralty business,” so Wilson doesn’t have to upbraid Germany over sinking this particular ship and killing these particular American citizens (and mules). Also, the u-boat ordered the Armenian to stop and fired warning shots, but the mule ship tried to run (the captain admits this), which under the rules for this kind of thing made the Armenian fair game.

The Archbishop of York, presiding over a committee on “war babies,” says the responsibility for men giving way to temptation rests not chiefly with them, but with those who, often against the will of the men, pestered them with their attentions.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt has an emergency appendectomy.

Rudolph Malik, an Austrian salesman stuck in the US after the war began, is indicted for sending a letter to Woodrow Wilson demanding $300 or he’d commit a “political crime.” (Update: in court his lawyer will claim that Malik’s threat didn’t constitute a criminal act because there is no such thing as a “political crime” in US law).

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Today -100: July 1, 1915: Of Armenians, reading and whiting, and secret bases

It’s just not a good year for Armenians. In this case, it’s the steamship SS Armenian, which is torpedoed off Cornwall. A British ship bringing 1,422 war mules from the US for use by the French army.  The majority of the Armenian’s dead crew are Americans, including muleteers, almost all of whom were black. Mules are considered contraband, so the Germans will consider themselves justified.

Headline of the Day -100: 

No, that typo isn’t revealing at all. The New York constitutional convention.

Italy protests its nominal allies Serbia and Montenegro invading Albania and capturing Scutari.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: A “very reliable source” tells the NYT that Germany is trying to build a secret submarine base on an island off the New England coast, from which u-boats would attack freighters carrying munitions.

The US arrests four more Mexicans implicated in Huerta’s plot, which as he said was to visit his daughter and then take in the Panama-Pacific Exposition and definitely not to restore him to power in Mexico through violence.

Secretary of War Garrison telegrams Col. Morgan at Fort Bliss asking him to stop treating Huerta to such courtesies as dinners in his honor, invitations to review the troops, etc., given that he is, you know, under indictment.

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¿Quien es mas punchable?

With Chris Christie entering the race, it’s time once again to rank the Republican candidates’ faces from least punchable to most punchable. Here’s what I got:

Pataki
Fiorina
Walker
Carson
Paul
Graham
Rubio
Jindal
Perry
Jeb!
Cruz
Huckabee
Christie
Trump
Santorum

Your mileage may vary.

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Today -100: June 30, 1915: Of mediators, mind-readers, and cheering diggers

Woodrow Wilson cancels his trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco because he’s certain the warring European countries are about to ask him to mediate a peace agreement. Any day now.

The conviction of mind-reader W. Bert Reese for fortune-telling is overturned on appeal after he proves that he can, in fact, read minds, correctly recounting things the judge wrote down. Reese says it’s not his fault if he has abnormal powers. Reese once convinced Thomas Edison that he was a genuine psychic.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: June 29, 1915: I have not willed this!

Georgia’s new governor, Nathaniel Harris, says the Frank case is over and everyone should go home. Former Gov. Slaton flees the state.

Speaking of fleers, Huerta says that far from planning to lead another uprising in Mexico, he would only return to Mexico if it needs him to defend its flag. Very reassuring.

Supposedly, Kaiser Wilhelm visited the Western front and wept over a pile of dead German soldiers, “I have  not willed this!”

Germany and the US disagree over whether the 1799 US-Prussian Treaty allows Germany to sink American ships such as the William P. Frye. Germany seems to think it can sink as many ships as it likes, providing it then pays compensation in an amount it determines by itself.

Headline of the Day -100:

And the tuberculosis-industrial complex grinds to a halt. The strike is at the Montefiore Home Country Sanitarium for Consumptives in Bedford Hills, NY, where a new superintendent put in place rules strictly segregating the sexes and barring inmates from leaving without permission.

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Today -100: June 28, 1915: Of lamps, mazes of machinations, and boomeranging psyops

It’s the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Inspired by his factory burning down six months ago, Thomas Edison invents a “fireman’s lamp,” a portable lamp with a two-pound battery that can see through smoke.

Former Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta and Gen. Pascual Orozco are arrested in New Mexico for violating US neutrality laws by planning military intervention in Mexico. Both are released on bond. Huerta claims he wasn’t about to cross into Mexico but is actually on a perfectly innocent visit to his daughter and then a vacation at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, although curiously his ticket was only to El Paso.

Carranza applauds the US’s “act of justice” in disrupting Huerta’s “maze of machinations conducted in secrecy against the peace of Mexico by well-known reactionaries”.

Yes, he actually said “the peace of Mexico.”

The London Daily Mail claims that Austria, in talking up the idea of a separate peace with Serbia as a propaganda ploy to create difficulties between Serbia and Italy, nominal allies who both lust after the same territory, has unintentionally made the Italian public euphoric at a prospect of peace which is entirely unrealistic.

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Today -100: June 27, 1915: I am not saying that woman suffrage will make women crazy

Russia forces out Minister of War Vladimir Sukhomlinov, a 66-year-old, old-fashioned cavalry guy perhaps not best suited to running a 20th-century war. In 1916 he’ll be arrested for treason, because some of his associates were accused of spying for Germany. The post-Revolution Menshevik government will put him on trial for leaving Russia unprepared for the war and send him to Siberia before exiling him.

The German socialist newspaper Vorwärts is suspended yet again, for publishing a Social Democratic Party appeal for peace with no conquest or annexation.

Georgia Gov. John Slaton leaves office, to the sounds of a mob, unhappy with his commutation of Leo Frank’s death sentence, baying “Lynch him!”, as was the custom, held back only by a force of police and soldiers (the mob, not the governor). Slaton is planning to leave the state until it’s safe to come back, which may be a while. 20 men are caught near Slaton’s house carrying guns and dynamite. Mobs are searching outgoing railroad trains for him. Slaton says he acted according to his conscience and unlike another former governor, one Pontius Pilate, he didn’t turn a Jew over to a mob. There are reports of secret meetings forming branches of something called the Knights of Mary Phagan and taking blood oaths to avenge her death on Slaton and Frank.

The NYT publishes a letter to Alice Chittenden of the NY State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage from Dr. Charles Dana, professor of nervous diseases at Cornell Medical College, announcing his opposition to the “distant and selfish cry” for women’s suffrage, which he calls “a holy cult of self and sex”. He asserts that the nervous systems of men and women are entirely different physiologically and that women are way more prone to insanity, which would increase 25% if they lived as men do. “I am not saying that woman suffrage will make women crazy. I do say that woman suffrage would throw into the electorate a mass of voters of delicate nervous stability.” He adds that the average suffrage zealot has the mental age of 11. And he should know because he’s a doctor. And a professor. At Cornell.

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Today -100: June 26, 1915: No flame, no gain

Headline of the Day -100:

Germany again claims that Britain and France used gas first. In fact, they’re now claiming that the Lusitania was secretly carrying tetrachloride of tin to be used in Allied poison gas shells.

The British government asks the public to eat less meat.

Momentarily Puzzling Headline of the Day -100: 

And why would the French government be attempting to place an order with the Essex Novelty Company of New Jersey, you ask? Is Gen. Joffre secretly Wile E. Coyote? Reading further, it turns out that the Essex Novelty Company makes fireworks and France asked them to make detonator caps, but they refused.

Headline of the Day -100:
 

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Today -100: June 25, 1915: Of blockades, fainting empresses, popes, and colorful nicknames

Britain replies to US complaints about its blockade of Germany, saying the US has nothing to complain about.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The Novoe Vremya claims that when the German empress was visiting wounded soldiers at Posen, one officer, near death from shrapnel wounds and with all of his limbs amputated, told her he wished Kaiser Wilhelm and all his children suffered as he has. The kaiserin was removed “in a fainting condition.” Also, Red Cross nurses have heard such stories about how one of them was supposedly treated by a German officer that they all carry poison around with them to prevent capture. More fog: Austrian troops are supposedly shooting all clergy in Galicia, on general principles.

French Catholic newspapers are not best pleased at the idea of dead soldiers being incinerated. Some people think they’re kicking up such a fuss because non-Catholic French people are pissed at the pope for an interview he gave complaining about the Italian government in general and its censoring of his mail in particular and failing to declare himself on the Allied side of the war. There have also been rumors that the Vatican is considering moving to Spain for the duration.

Gangster Names of the Day -100: In the Tombs, Benny “Hey, Why Don’t I Have a Nickname?” Snyder is beaten nearly to death by three other prisoners wielding breakfast bowls for being a “squealer.” Snyder murdered “Pinchy” Paul on behalf of Joe the Greaser, a rival of “Dopey Benny” Fein.

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Today -100: June 24, 1915: Can’t you buy clothing from an American? Can’t you buy shoes from an American?

Germany and Austria capture Lemberg (now Lviv), which Russian troops had occupied last September.

British Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George gives trade union leaders seven days to produce an army of munitions workers pledged to go anywhere in the country they are told to go, in exchange for “a certificate attesting that they are working for King and country” – or else some measure of legal compulsion will be introduced. So he’s threatening conscription for factory workers when there isn’t even conscription for soldiers yet.

Lloyd George is sending David Thomas, the coal magnate, back to the US and Canada to represent the Munitions Ministry. Jeez, Thomas is still wringing out his clothes from the last mission he undertook for the government (he came back on the Lusitania).

Sir Richard Ashmole Cooper, MP says that last week he offered the government 24 million shells from the UK, Canada and the US, as well as 1 billion rifle cartridges and 2 million rifles. “If this offer is not accepted I want to know the reason why.” The reason why, Lloyd George explains, is that when the War Office asked Sir Richard the names of the companies that would produce all these things, he gave them the name of one company, which was actually a lithographic printing company, but was willing to give it a go.

Someone tries to dynamite Andrew Carnegie’s house on 5th Avenue, but a cop spots the burning fuse.

Carranza replies to Pres. Wilson’s ultimatum, saying no he won’t negotiate with Villa or anyone else, he’d much rather crush his enemies militarily.

More blowback from Leo Frank’s commutation: anonymous letters have been sent to Jews in Marietta, Georgia, telling them to leave the city. And cards are being distributed in Atlanta asking people to boycott Jewish businesses and patronize “Americans” instead.

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Today -100: June 23, 1915: The evil that theorists may do lives after them

A NYT editorial on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down grandfather clauses says the 15th Amendment was a mistake: “It attempted to thwart by legislation a determination which has never been thwarted in the history of the human race by legislation or any other thing whatever – the determination of the white man to rule the land wherein he lives. ... The evil that theorists may do lives after them; their best intentions may become a curse to the country.”

H.G. Wells thinks the Allies can win the war through air power. Part of his thinking seems to be an assumption that Germans are better suited to the methodical, orderly work of trench and artillery warfare than to the romantic work of aviators.

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