Today -100: August 7, 1915: Just two more years

US forces are now in control of the strategic buildings and whatnot in Port au Prince, and they’ve only had to slaughter a few Haitians.

Frederick Davenport, a former Republican member of the New York State Senate and the Progressive Party candidate for lieutenant governor in 1912 and governor in 1914, defects back to the Republicans, saying all Progressives should do the same. He’ll eventually get back into the State Senate and then the US Congress.

London insurers are writing policies that will pay if peace does not come by September 30, 1917.

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Today -100: August 6, 1915: So full of a glory so pure that it will forever illumine the human race

The German Army moves into Warsaw, which the NYT notes is the 3rd largest city in the Russian Empire. There was no battle; it was a strategic retreat by the Russians, after they stripped the city of everything useful and blew up all the bridges over the Vistula.

Kaiser Wilhelm is reported to plan making Poland (that is, the Polish lands previously divided between Russia, Germany and Austria) a semi-autonomous state under joint German-Austrian-Polish rule.

The French parliament celebrates the anniversary of the start of the war. President of the Chamber of Deputies Paul Deschanel, manic pixie dreamgirl that he is, says “This year has been so full of a glory so pure that it will forever illumine the human race. It has been a year in which France, the France of Joan of Arc and Valmy, has risen, if possible, to even greater heights.” A statement by President of the Republic Raymond Poincaré is read, praising the unity of France at greater length than seems strictly necessary, and saying that “on the victory of France and the Allies rests the future of civilization and humanity.”

Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, former missionary and member of the British Parliament, is arrested in New York on a charge of being a fugitive from justice from Britain, where he is wanted for forgery, although he says that that’s just an excuse because he’s actually a spy for Germany (he was born a Hungarian citizen), a charge for which he could not be extradited. He will be extradited and be put in a British prison until 1919, then deported. He’ll spend the next few years hanging around fringe right-wingers (including Hitler), happily selling their secrets to any government that would pay. Then he’ll become a Buddhist monk, because of course he will, and found a monastery, although it sounds like he was mostly in it for the chicks and dough, and announced that he was the new Dalai Lama. Although he worked for the German and Japanese secret services, he also wrote a letter to Hitler protesting the extermination of the Jews, so Germany asked the Japanese to poison him (he was in Shanghai) in 1943. The end.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Naked Headline of the Day -100: 

Aussies, of course.

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Today -100: August 5, 1915: Of beaten villas, airplanes, ill-feeling, three revolutions, no waiting, and hard dictators

Pancho Villa’s wife leaves Mexico, saying Villa knows he’s beaten.

H.G. Wells wants a fleet of a thousand aeroplanes to fight the war. Planes, he says, fit the individualistic character of the English and French, while Zeppelins are typical of the Germans, with large crews working in unison under orders.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says that while the Napoleonic, Crimean and Boer wars were followed by no ill-feeling, the beastly conduct of the Germans in this war means they won’t and indeed shouldn’t ever be forgiven. No more German tourists in London, no English art students in Munich, etc.

British Colonial Secretary Andrew Bonar Law says after the war the Dominions (Canada, Australia, South Africa) would have a role in governing the British Empire (spoiler alert: they won’t).

There are three revolutions going on in Portugal.

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Today -100: August 4, 1915: Of rocks, blockades, godfathers, and eggs

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: the Italian army is said to have killed over 10,000 Austrian soldiers by rolling rocks down hills at them.

The Providence Journal claims that Gen. Huerta’s attempt to sneak into Mexico and try to take back power was actually a German plot, a plot thwarted by... the Providence Journal.

Word reaches Paris that Turks slaughtered all the males in the Bitlis region of Armenia, then drove 9.000 women and children to the banks of the Tigris river, shot them and dumped the bodies in the river. Which is true.

Britain finally responds to Woodrow Wilson’s note complaining about the enforcement of the blockade of Germany. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey says, yeah, we’re gonna keep doing what we’re doing.

Kaiser Wilhelm loosens his weird rules for when he’ll be a godfather. He does it for seventh sons for some reason, but previously they had to be the 7th son from both parents. Henceforth, they only have to be the 7th son of the mother.

Headline of the Day -100:

French cardinals respond to the pope’s call for peace and his offer of mediation with a call for a day of prayer for French victory.

A month ago, we are just finding out, Woodrow Wilson sent a plan to fix Mexico to 6 Latin American countries. Secretary of State Lansing will now hold a conference with the ambassadors of those countries. The details of the Wilson plan are unknown, except that it will discard Carranza, Villa and Zapata, and in some way pretend to adhere to the constitution, perhaps by naming as president whoever the highest-ranking surviving member of the Madero cabinet is.

How is this story not on the front page?

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Today -100: August 3, 1915: Our country seeks only her own advantages and wishes to realize her rights

The German occupation authorities in Belgium arrest British nurse Edith Cavell for smuggling Allied soldiers out of Belgium. She will be executed in October.

Various pro-peace (i.e., pro-German) groups with names like Friends of Peace, the American Truth Society, and the American Fair Play Society, attack Secretary of State Robert Lansing as a menace to peace who should resign or be forced out before he drags the US into war with Germany against the will of the people.

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Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov, not even slightly chagrined at negotiating with both sides concurrently, says “Our country seeks only her own advantages and wishes to realize her rights. ... The only question to be settled is, how can we achieve our aim with the least sacrifice?”

News from Haiti: “Since the uprising in Port au Prince last week... there has been desultory fighting around Cape Haitien between the Blot and Bobo factions.” Worst... comic book.... ever. Evidently Woodrow Wilson gave Adm. Capterton really broad authority to do pretty much anything he wants to bring about law & order and a new puppet government in Haiti.

A crew member of the US steamship Leelanaw, which was sunk by a German u-boat off the UK last week, is put in prison by the British when it is discovered that he is German (and pretending to be Dutch).

A NYT editorial appeals to women suffragists not to bother the 64th Congress with their silly little issue when it has so many important things to deal with instead. It worries that sympathetic congresscritters “may be impelled, through their sense of chivalry, to waste the nation’s precious time in debating the question.”

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Today -100: August 2, 1915: Of marines, caskets, and flammenwerferapparaten

Both Germany and Russia will soon offer autonomy or independence to Poland. Neither of them will mean it.

The French land some marines in Haiti to protect their embassy, but only after asking permission – from the Americans. No Haitians were asked.

Headline of the Day -100:

I knew this war was missing something: flamethrowers (Flammenwerferapparaten). The article calls them “flame projectors,” the term flamethrower, adopted from the German, not yet having entered the English language.

The cops, having read that story about the plaque on the casket of executed cop Charles Becker accusing the governor of murdering him, go to his widow’s home and take it right off the casket.

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Today -100: August 1, 1915: Full of gratitude, we can say today that God is with us

Secretary of State Robert Lansing says US forces will remain in Haiti indefinitely. The US plans to impose a fiscal arrangement where it will operate Haitian customs collections in the interests of foreign loan-holders (as in the Dominican Republican) and a treaty whereby the US can intervene in Haitian affairs whenever it feels like it (as in Cuba). The revolutionaries have settled on a president after being turned down by their first 12 choices: someone named General Bobo.

Kaiser Wilhelm, on more or less the one-year anniversary of the start of the war, tells the German people: “Before God and history my conscience is clear; I have not willed war. Full of gratitude, we can say today that God is with us.”

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Carranza’s forces capture – or re-capture, or re-re-capture, or whatever it is – Mexico City.

British recruiting poster issued some time this month:

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Today -100: July 31, 1915: Never has the country been so virile

Britain executes two spies whose names it won’t release, after a secret trial. But I’m sure everyone wore wigs in court, so it’s probably all above-board and tickety-boo.

Do you hyphenate tickety-boo?

The French parliament is debating French penis size, or something. “Never has the country been so virile,” Minister of Finance Alexandre Ribot says.

Lord Northbourne, 69, says he wants to duel Kaiser Wilhelm.

The population of Warsaw is evacuating into Russia proper. They’re stripping the city of, well, everything. Especially anything the Germans could use, obviously.

Charles Becker is executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. He was an NYPD lieutenant on the vice squad who was involved in the murder three years ago of a bookie, Herman Rosenthal, who was going to expose police corruption. Becker was the first cop ever executed for murder in the US. It took three shocks to kill him.

Haitian snipers kill two of the invading US marines, who kill 6 Haitians. 2,000 military personnel will be sent to Haiti, which is a larger force than required for the stated goal of protecting foreigners’ property. And they have a lot of machine guns. A lot.

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Today -100: July 30, 1915: They have some rights that the white man is bound to respect

US Secretary of State Robert Lansing telegraphs the leaders of various Mexican factions, telling them to allow the resumption of railroad traffic between Vera Cruz and Mexico City so food can reach the latter. There may be a delay in Zapata getting his telegram – I hear that railroad traffic between Vera Cruz and Mexico City is down.

Headline of the Day -100:

Negroes in Tennessee are supposedly complaining about whites breaking the Jim Crow laws and sitting in the black section of trains. In Virginia a black person can ask a white person in the wrong section to vacate his seat and he is required to do so even if there are no seats in the white section and he has to stand. The NYT says “The protest of the Tennessee negroes is just. They have some rights that the white man is bound to respect, and one of them is the right to choose their company.”

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The vanishing Amazon link

I removed the Amazon referral link from my sidebar. I noticed that for a while I hadn’t been getting any actual, you know, money from it, and finally got around to checking if anyone had been placing orders through it. Yes, they had. So I connected to Amazon, which said that they had determined, through some sort of proprietary top-secret algorithm or something, that the order had been placed by me or someone I knew, and were therefore ineligible. The only information I can access is what has been purchased, not by whom, so for all I know it was a friend or friends of mine, but if not, I can’t challenge the proprietary top-secret algorithm or something because it’s, you know, proprietary and top secret.

There are two possibilities here: 1) Amazon is cheating me out of my 4%. 2) It knows who my friends are (or people it considers to be my friends). Which is creepy. Either makes it essential that I sever my very slightly remunerative relations with Amazon, but the second, creepy possibility seemed like something I should share with the group.

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Today -100: July 29, 1915: Of a Haitian recall election

Haitian Pres. Vilbrun Guillaume Sam is dragged out of the French embassy and killed, his body torn apart and dragged through the streets by a presumably angry mob. US marines are landed, their mission to protect American and other foreign lives and then quickly leave the country.

In 1934.

Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, German naval attaché in Washington by day, head of espionage & sabotage operations in North America by night, says that Germany won’t change its submarine warfare policy or even “condescend to reply” to Woodrow Wilson’s note until he protests just as vehemently against British violations of neutrality. (Or not: the German ambassador will say that the Providence Journal made up the whole interview.)

Evidently when William Jennings Bryan resigned as secretary of state, he appropriated his desk as a souvenir. I say his desk, but it had actually been the desk of all the secretaries of state for the previous 50 years. The NYT has an acidly sarcastic editorial (my favorite kind of NYT editorial) on the subject.

A coroner’s jury in Chicago rules that the capsizing of the Eastland is the fault of the Eastland’s captain and engineer, the general managers of the steamship company and the company leasing it, and two federal inspectors who passed the ship for passengers early this month. It recommends they all be charged with manslaughter.

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Today -100: July 28, 1915: Of poetry, dead presidents, and invisible planes

It’s one year since Austria declared war on Serbia. There’ll probably be cake or something.

Headline of the Day -100: 

War is hell.

Haiti is a bit of a mess, as is the custom. Pres. Vilbrun Guillaume Sam ordered a massacre of 167 political prisoners, including former Pres. Oreste Zamor. Angry crowds, said to consist largely of relatives of the 167, pull the governor of Port-au-Prince, who carried out the executions, out of the Santo Domingo embassy where’s hiding and kill him. The president is now hiding in the French embassy, for all the good it will do him.

The Cologne Gazette says that Germany now possesses invisible airplanes. Specifically, Fokker monoplanes covered with cellon, an early form of plastic. It does reduce the plane’s visibility in clear skies, but it’s also reflective, occasionally blinding its planes’ pilots, so the experiment will ultimately be abandoned, except by Wonder Woman.

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Rick Perry shoots off mouth, foot

Perry said that if people in the Lafayette, LA movie theater had just been armed, everything would have been just fine.

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Today -100: July 27, 1915: An expected damnable outrage

A German u-boat sinks the US steamship Leelanaw a bit off Britain’s Orkney Islands, but it did it the nice way: not without warning like the Lusitania, but after asking it politely to stop, determining that it was carrying contraband (flax), politely asking the Leelanaw’s crew to evacuate and come aboard the u-boat, then sinking it, and putting the crew back on their life-boats nearer to shore. Technically, under the 1828 Prussia-US treaty, they should have allowed the Leelanaw to jettison its cargo and not sink it, but hey close enough, right?

Woodrow Wilson doesn’t have a response yet – he’s waiting for details – but, not surprisingly, Theodore Roosevelt isn’t waiting: “It’s a damnable outrage, but one that was to have been expected. I wonder what our pacifist friends will say to this? Wait for a whole year to discuss it, I suppose?” (The latter referring to William Jennings Bryan’s arbitration treaties).

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Hudson County, NJ Sheriff Eugene Kinkead (a former US congressman) decides to personally end the Standard Oil/Tideland strike in Bayonne, punching and arresting a strike leader who turns out not to be an actual Standard Oil employee, and arresting and beating up IWW leader Frank Tannenbaum. Then he orders the men to return to work on a vague promise of an unspecified wage increase and somehow convinces the strike committee to resign when the strikers refuse. He then announces that he will protect anyone who returns to work. So now all he needs are a lot more cops than he has (he keeps insisting that these foreigners are really impressed by police uniforms). But neighboring towns refuse to send any, and the governor already refused national guard assistance, so he goes around to those towns and forcibly swears in every cop he meets, arresting or threatening to indict those who refuse. One captain puts out his stations’s lights and pretends no one’s there.

Britain responds (four months late) to the US complaint about its enforcement of its naval blockade of Germany. It says basically, “Hey remember how you seized British ships bringing ‘contraband’ to the Confederacy during the Civil War? Well, fuck you.”

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Today -100: July 26, 1915: Of excess bodies, POWs, field marshals, and wobblies

The NYT says 915 bodies have been recovered from the Eastland disaster and 563 are still missing, and I still don’t know how they’ve counted more bodies than there actually were. People are asking why a ship known to lean to one side because of its top-heavy design was still allowed to carry passengers.

Supposedly, a man who was standing by the river contemplating suicide when the Eastland turned turtle dived in and rescued 9 people.

Germany claims that it and Austria have taken 1.5 million Russians prisoner.

The king of Bavaria appoints Kaiser Wilhelm a Field Marshal of the Bavarian Army, and Willy accepts, although it is a matter of debate whether the king of Bavaria actually has that power. This seems to be a way for Bavaria to assert itself at a time when Prussians are dominating everything in Germany.

A mob of 10,000 Italians storm Philadelphia Hall to stop an IWW meeting, having heard that the Wobblies have been telling Italian reservists not to go home to fight.

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Today -100: July 25, 1915: The Eastland disaster

The SS Eastland, a ship used for tourist excursions, rolls over in the Chicago River, drowning 1,800 according to the NYT, at least 919 according to the Chicago Tribune, and 844 according to Wikipedia (or, elsewhere in the article, 848)(So how in hell does the NYT have a figure of 889 recovered bodies?) Either way, way more than were killed by Mrs O’Leary’s cow in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the largest previous disaster in Chicago.

They were employees of the Western Electric Company, being taken on a picnic. The Eastland was simply a badly designed, top-heavy ship, took on water ballast ineptly, and was carrying more passengers than the legal maximum of 2,500. Also adding to the excess weight, ironically, were 15 tons of lifeboats added due to legislation passed after the Titanic.

The captain is nearly lynched on the wharf when he tries to stop rescuers, I guess because they were dismantling his ship to get to people trapped in it. Chicago, as was the custom, is after blood. The coroner orders the arrest of every official of the Indiana Transportation Company. 4 of those officials and two of the crew will be indicted and tried in 1916, the former for manslaughter, the latter for criminal negligence. They’ll get off scot free, although to be fair, the chief engineer, who was defended by Clarence Darrow, seems to have been a hero, nearly drowning while keeping the boiler from exploding as the ship sank.

Headline of the Day -100:

Standard Oil refuses arbitration of the demands of the Bayonne refinery strikers.  Why are the workers almost entirely foreigners, anyway? The Tidewater Oil Company plant’s guards have been taking random potshots from the factory stockades at houses and saloons and tenements. The sheriff tells the company that if any more shots are fired except in defense of life – “and by that I mean life, not property” – he’ll arrest company officials. It stops. (Update: no it doesn’t, and tomorrow Sheriff Eugene Kinkead will arrest 30 Tidewater employees).

William Creen, the prisoner who tried to kill Leo Frank, tells Georgia Governor Nat Harris that he only did it to prevent an attack on the prison by a lynch mob, so really he was just preventing bloodshed.

Relatedly, a meeting is held in La Grange, Georgia which calls on the Jews of Georgia to deny the charges that they have been the subjects of prejudice and/or race hatred. “By their silence they have indorsed all the vile charges, and if these charges be true it is high time that they were seeking more congenial climes.” Yup, no prejudice or race hatred in Georgia, that’s for sure.

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Today -100: July 24, 1915: Of flims

Three Cleveland companies manufacturing munitions for the Allies have been warned by the government of a plot to blow up their factories.

A German privy councillor (and author of “The Propeller and Its Effect on the Water”) says the British deliberately got the Lusitania sunk in order to bring the US into the war. Would I be mentioning this if his name weren’t Oswald Flamm? Probably not.

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Today -100: July 23, 1915: And worth every penny

John Wanamaker, president of the Philadelphia branch of the National Security League, proposes that the US buy Belgium from Germany for $100 billion, then give it its freedom. Belgium’s good for the money, he says.

The US sends its final note to Germany on submarine warfare. Basically, it says that the continuance of cordial relations between the two countries depends on Germany not blowing up US ships or killing Americans on other ships unless in accordance with the rules of war. No further response from Germany is expected or desired, just, you know, not blowing up US ships etc. “Repetition by the commanders of German naval vessels of acts in contravention of those rights must be regarded by the Government of the United States, when they affect American citizens, as deliberately unfriendly.”

Today -100’s Notable Deaths:

1) Inez Vernon, widow of George Vernon, who died on the Lusitania, commits suicide.

2) Henry Clay Ford, manager of Ford’s Theatre at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. He was married to the actress who played the female lead in the first US production of H.M.S. Pinafore.

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Today -100: July 22, 1915: No nation ever amounted to anything if its population was composed of pacifists and poltroons

Theodore Roosevelt at the Panama-Pacific Exposition: “A mother who is not willing to raise her boy to be a soldier is not fit for citizenship.” “I’m not for war [ed.: ha!], I want peace, but don’t want peace for Uncle Sam because outsiders don’t think him worth kicking.” He says the US has been “culpably, well-nigh criminally, remiss” in not increasing its military preparedness. Just look at how screwed Belgium and China are, he says. “The average Chinaman took the view that China was too proud to fight,” he says, using Woodrow Wilson’s phrase.  “The professional pacifists, the peace-at-any-price, non-resistance, universal arbitration people are now seeking to Chinafy this country.” Not surprisingly, he calls for universal military service for men and for preparing our souls. “If we become soft and flabby physically and morally we shall fail. No nation ever amounted to anything if its population was composed of pacifists and poltroons, if its sons did not have the fighting edge”.

The South Wales coal strike is over, after Lloyd George comes down to mediate personally. They love LG in Wales.

With one dead at the Standard Oil strike in Bayonne, NJ, the national guard is sent in. One unusual feature: the sheriff orders the arrest of guards who came out of the plant with clubs and attacked strikers.

The US government will start suing Americans to whom it provided relief funds when they were stuck in Belgium at the start of the war. Just the wealthy ones who can afford to pay it back.

Hungary will now conscript men up to 50 years old.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: July 21, 1915: Of strikes, occupations, and corpses

The Remington Arms & Ammo Company strike fizzles after the company gives machinists an 8-hour day and a pay increase.

Headline of the Day -100:

In Bayonne, New Jersey. Mostly Polish, I think.

Zapatistas reoccupy Mexico City.

Bodies from the Lusitania are still washing ashore, two and a half months later.

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