Today -100: November 10, 1915: Of anconas, red crosses, mikados, and zeppelin insurance

An Austrian u-boat sinks the SS Ancona, an Italian passenger ship, in the Mediterranean off the coast of Tunisia, without warning. It was heading from Naples to New York. Over 200 are dead, about half of those on board. The U-38 was just nominally Austrian; its captain is a German, Max Valentiner, and I think its crew as well. Not sure how that works legally, since Germany was not yet at war with Italy.

The Providence Journal claims that before he was expelled, Austrian Ambassador Konstantin Dumba tricked the American Red Cross into sending hundreds of documents containing military secrets to Austria, disguised as tetanus vaccine.

Japan’s Emperor Taisho is formally crowned.

The Indian colonial government bans a pamphlet based on William Jennings Bryan’s “British Rule in India” (1906) from the mails.

The British government is now selling anti-zeppelin insurance, but only to the poor.

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Today -100: November 9, 1915: The perpetuity of the nation depends upon the women of the country

A side-note to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory fire: the nephew of the couple who owned the building, Alfred Raff, had just returned from being on the lam in Boston after he hit-and-ran a 16-year-old girl with his aunt’s car. Right after the fire, a nearby bakery owner saw him running down the street. He told her there was a fire and when asked why he hadn’t turned in an alarm, yelled “To hell with the factory.” Charming. Raff previously served a couple of years in Elmira for burglary.

At the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, Pres. Samuel Gompers calls for removing women and children from factories. “The perpetuity of the nation depends upon the women of the country, and we want to do all we can for them.” Sure you do.

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Today -100: November 8, 1915: Of neutral rights, fire inspectors, and benevolent neutrality

The US sends Britain a note saying its blockade of European ports is illegal and asserting the rights of the US and other neutral countries. It’s not entirely clear what the US plans to do if Britain ignores the note and continues to interfere with trade with neutral European countries (on the theory that they might sell stuff on to Germany).

The Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory building that burned down yesterday was not up to code, but, members of the State Industrial Commission point out, there are too few inspectors to enforce the codes enacted after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Will they ask the Legislature to budget for more inspectors? “No,” says Commissioner James Lynch, “What’s the use?” There are 65 inspectors for something like 35,000 factories. I say something like because they don’t even seem to know just how many factories they’re supposed to be inspecting.

Stephanos Skouloudis, the new Greek prime minister, says his government will continue to keep Greece out of the war but it will have a “benevolent neutrality” towards the Entente.

A letter to the NYT by pulp writer and Founding Father descendent Gouverneur Morris, addressed “to the children,” asks them to request that Santa Claus bring them French-made toys and not German ones “for the sake of the American children who were drowned like so many blind kittens when the Germans sank the Lusitania.” Also, Germany toys are ugly and French ones “are beautiful and they are clean. And there is no blood on them.”

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Today -100: November 7, 1915: Of fires, saxonias, violent electrical waves, kitcheners, and lambs

A factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn burns down, killing at least a dozen people. As in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, there were too few fire escapes and insufficient fireproofing of stairways. The owners, who had been ordered to rectify this 3 months ago, are arrested. Also, naturally, the door to the emergency stairway was locked on the 4th floor - all the deaths were from people on the 4th and 5th floor. The building housed a candy factory and two shirt factories, but it is not yet known where the fire started. Today the site is home to a vintage clothing store, because Brooklyn.

The Cunard liner Saxonia turns away 900 Irishmen who’d bought tickets for the US, following strenuous objections from Liverpool mobs to these able-bodied men evading military service (even though there is no conscription yet). This will be Cunard policy now, and White Star will follow suit in a couple of days.

Nikola Tesla thinks the Nobel Prize he is reported (wrongly) to be receiving must be for his discovery of the means to transmit electricity without wires, which he believes will change the world and make the deserts bloom and so on. “I also believe that ultimately all battles, if they should come, will be waged by electrical waves instead of explosives.”

Lord Kitchener will tour the eastern front, leading to rumors that he is resigning as secretary of war. He isn’t, but it may well be that his cabinet colleagues thought it would be a good idea to get him somewhere where he can’t do too much damage like the Balkans and, hey, Herb, maybe you should check out the action in Egypt too, as long as you’re heading in that direction anyway, take your time.

The Lamb, Douglas Fairbanks’ first movie, is released.

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Today -100: November 6, 1915: The ground upon which all preparation for war is made

Jews will now be allowed to become officers in the Bavarian army.

Reuters reports that Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. This is not true, so there will be all sorts of wild theories premised on the idea that they were supposed to be and then... something... happened.

Headline of the Day -100: 

So Germany can feed itself with sugar beets, despite the Allied embargo.

Former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan says Pres. Wilson’s plan to expand the military (which has been costed at $1 billion over 5 years) is “not only a menace to our peace and safety, but a challenge to the spirit of Christianity which teaches us to influence others by example rather than by exciting fear. The president says that we should be prepared ‘not for aggression but for defense.’ That is the ground upon which all preparation for war is made.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

That is NOT A EUPHEMISM.

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Today -100: November 5, 1915: She stands in friendly relation with all the world

The Greek government falls. Someone was rude to the war minister in parliament, and he stormed out. When he returned, the opposition leader said he needed to apologize, the prime minister said he didn’t and he’d would resign if parliament insisted on one, which is what happens. The real cause is the same one behind the collapse of the other 83 Greek governments (approx.) this year: the king’s insistence on keeping Greece out of the war against the wishes of the majority of the Greek people.

Woodrow Wilson explains his plans to increase, very modestly, the training of “civilian soldiers.” “We have it in mind to be prepared, but not for war, but only for defense... No thoughtful man feels any panic haste in this matter. The country is not threatened from any quarter. She stands in friendly relation with all the world.” The NYT transcript of the speech provides our Typo of the Day -100: “But we feel justified in preparing ourselves to vindicate our right to independent and unmolested action by making the farce that is in us ready for assertion.”

In their newspaper Britannia (renamed from The Suffragette last month), Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst attack the government, and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in particular, for “betraying” Serbia. Christabel writes that Serbia is the keeper of the gate of the British Empire, whatever that means, and a “free Slav nation, untouched by German influence.” Britannia’s harsh – and I mean harsh – attacks on politicians and military leaders like Grey and Lord Haldane and Sir William Robertson for being insufficiently warlike or even traitorous resulted in the paper being raided and seized more often than The Suffragette was before the war.

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Today -100: November 4, 1915: Never again will I speak from a street corner

Harriot Stanton Blatch, pissed at the loss of the suffrage referenda, says “Never again will I speak from a street corner. Never again will I make an appeal to an individual voter. It is utter folly for a disfranchised class, with no party to support it, to attend a referendum. We can’t follow up an individual voter, but we can one in a legislative body.” And then she goes Donald Trumpish, complaining about recent male immigrant voters: “I call it tyranny and license for them to have power to pass upon me and upon the native born women of America”.

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Today -100: November 3, 1915: For the good of the State and the good of the women

Election results are coming in. Women’s suffrage was crushed in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

These defeats, following that in New Jersey last month, will lead to a shift in tactics by suffragists to a federal suffrage amendment, bypassing hostile male voters (in any case most of the states voting this year have provisions preventing a re-vote on the issue for 4 or 5 years).

The NYT, as is the custom, gloats: “The defeat of woman suffrage in three great Eastern States yesterday... is unmistakable and ample notice to the suffragists that the old, highly developed, populous, complex Commonwealths of the East will have none of a political experiment that some simpler, meagerly settled communities fo the West have ventured to make. ... It could not be accepted there with the easy carelessness of sparse Western populations eager for innovations. The men of the mighty industrial States voted it down for the good of the State and the good of the women.”

Mississippi’s new governor is Theodore Bilbo (D), a racist with a funny name. Read that Wikipedia entry, he sounds like the second coming of Coleman Blease. Unfortunately, the NYT didn’t cover his election campaign and it won’t cover his antics in office; according to the index, the next mention of him in the paper is a year and a half from now.

Massachusetts’s new governor is Samuel W. McCall (R) and its new lt. governor is Calvin Coolidge. The term for both those offices was one year.

New Yorkers reject the constitution the Constitution Convention came up with. Probably a good thing.

Ohio votes down prohibition.

Hey, a false rumor about the death of a German crown prince. It’s been a while. How I’ve missed you, false rumors about the deaths of German princes.

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Today -100: November 2, 1915: Of voting men, diverting divorces, fetishes, and sous

Headline of the Day -100: 

The New York women’s suffrage referendum. More voters have registered this year than for last year’s gubernatorial election (evidently New Yorkers had to register every single election, which sounds like a major pain in the ass).

The German military governor of Brussels, Gen. von Sauberzweig, is removed, evidently because of his mishandling of the Nurse Edith Cavell execution.

A British Divorce Court judge rules against a woman trying to divorce her husband, an army officer, saying it’s not in the interests of the nation “for men to have their minds diverted from their duties by such matters.”

The Supreme Court rules Arizona’s anti-alien labor law, a 1914 ballot initiative requiring that 80% of employees at companies employing more than five workers be U.S. citizens, unconstitutional.

Theodore Roosevelt finds Pres. Wilson’s ship-building plans inadequate. He wants to restore the US Navy to the position of the world’s second largest. And a bigger army. And universal (male) military service.

Former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau denounces the Briand government as merely a shuffle of the same old cards, the politicians who have been attempting to bludgeon the public into acquiescence through fetish worship, “which replaces in negro tribes any scientific investigation of facts” (in this analogy, the political leaders are the fetishes).

France is running out of small change. The popular belief is that the Germans are somehow seizing the sous for their copper and spiriting it out of France.

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Today -100: November 1, 1915: We shall not give life to a child and a child to life

British soldiers finally get steel helmets.

The New York anti-suffragists claim that only 10% of the state’s women want the vote and also claim, wrongly, that the suffragists’ assertion that 1 million women want it is based on a postcard canvass by the New York World. In fact, says Carrie Chapman Catt, they conducted a door-to-door canvass of the state.

Rabbi Stephen Wise (a big Jewish/Zionist leader) says the European war won’t end until women have the vote, and they should protest the war by refusing to give birth, saying “We shall not give life to a child and a child to life”.

If a birth strike doesn’t work, how about an arboreal one?

Oh, okay, not an actual tree but the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Tree will shortly be coming to the US to make movies, including a now lost version of Macbeth (produced by D.W. Griffith, with Constance Collier as Lady Macbeth).

In Salt Lake City, police major H.P. Myton shoots and kills IWW organizer Roy Horton, who had just told him “A man who would pack a star is no good and that goes for you.” Horton was campaigning against the forthcoming execution of hobo poet Joe Hill. Myton will be tried for murder but acquitted.

The Treasury Dept releases a list of names of 2,000 Americans who were stranded in Europe at the start of the war to whom the government loaned money which they haven’t repaid. Funnily enough, many turn out to have given false names and/or addresses. The NYT prints the names of the New Yorkers and tries to find some of them. G. Mortimer Wilmerding says the government never contacted him. My point is this: “G. Mortimer Wilmerding” is NOT one of the made-up names.

Update: I’ve googled him and it’s worse than I thought. His full name is Cuthbert Mortimer Wilmerding. Also, he was divorced in 1917 and his wife remarried and became a Mrs. Biddle, which makes me wonder if her sole purpose in life was collecting comical names.

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Today -100: October 31, 1915: Trying to crow like the rooster

At an anti-suffrage rally in Carnegie Hall, Col. John P. Irish of California says that only 20% of the women there take advantage of the franchise while the rest “detest it.” Further, since those 20% started voting, “juvenile delinquency has been increased 300%, simply because the human chicks are left to the hawk while the hen is up on the fence trying to crow like the rooster.”

McSweeney’s presents: 1915’s Sluttiest Halloween Costumes. Sadly, no saucy pictures.

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Today -100: October 30, 1915: Of cabinets, all the king’s horses, and aphasia

Aristide Briand announces his cabinet, which will be big enough to include every party and faction of the French Republic and several former prime ministers (in a couple of months he’ll cut it down to a size that can actually get things done).

War is hell:

Japan tells China not to restore the monarchy.

Judges overseeing naturalization cases in Chicago have taken to asking applicants whether they would bear arms for the US against their native country and whether they consider themselves Americans or European-Americans.

One form taken by shell shock is loss of speech. The Lancet reports some success in curing this with ether. Actually, that’s two cases, they’re really writing about just two cases? A third soldier achieved similar results by getting drunk.

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Today -100: October 29, 1915: Selfishness so acknowledged, without any moral sputtering or make believe

Kaiser Wilhelm loosens his rules on when he’ll be a godfather. It used to be just 7th sons, for some reason, now it’s all 7th, 8th and 9th sons, even if there’s a lowly girl in between. And if that doesn’t spur the German birth rate, I don’t know what will.

The French government headed by René Viviani resigns. Aristide Briand is cobbling together a new ministry. This all comes as a surprise to the French public. Briand is nominally a socialist, although he has long since broken with the party and moved rightward, as is the custom.

Lloyd George, speaking for the British government, emphatically denies that there are any peace negotiations going on.

He also rejects a backbencher’s suggestion that Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal funds which he still holds in England be seized in recompense for zeppelin raids. Lloyd George says it wouldn’t be “a practical method of deterring the enemy from further violations of international law.”

The NYT is unimpressed with Bulgaria’s reasons for joining the Central Powers: “If there were nothing else to be said for Bulgaria, the fact that she had cited import and export statistics to justify her conduct in this war would deserve to be remembered. It confers upon her a kind of unexpected distinction. Bulgaria is not for Kultur, at least not in business hours. Neither is she hostile to Civilization. Those things do not interest her. ... It is business; it is selfishness so acknowledged, without any moral sputtering or make believe.”

Germany will conduct a census of all its rabbits.

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Today -100: October 28, 1915: Baron Mumm keeps, well...

Baron Mumm von Schwarzenstein of the German Foreign Office denies having heard of the Germans arrested in the US for buying explosives to blow up munitions ships. He even denies the existence of a Secret Service.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: There are repeated stories in the press in Allied countries of military revolts and subsequent executions in Bulgaria.

The Allies are using the entry of Bulgaria into the war and the subsequent “Balkan crisis” as an excuse to cut their losses in Gallipoli.

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Today -100: October 27, 1915: And Republicans have been trying to set women on fire ever since

Republican party members parading in Philadelphia take a detour to attack a street-corner women’s suffrage meeting with Roman candles.

Tammany Hall isn’t taking a position on the NY women’s suffrage referendum.

California voters reject an initiative to make all state and local offices non-partisan.

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Today -100: October 26, 1915: And don’t get him started on semi-colons

Headline of the Day -100: 

Headline of the Day -100:

The US Supreme Court rules that immigration officials, in deciding whether immigrants are likely to become public charges, must consider only the immigrant (health, age and so on) and not, as some were doing, economic conditions in the area of the country the immigrants wanted to go.

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Today -100: October 25, 1915: We hope it will not be necessary to have any more executions

The passengers of a ship arriving in NY from Liverpool include 250 Irishmen escaping conscription. There isn’t any conscription in Britain (and it’ll take another couple of years to reach Ireland), but they’re escaping it nonetheless.

German Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Zimmermann says “It was a pity that Miss Cavell had to be executed, but it was necessary. She was judged justly. We hope it will not be necessary to have any more executions.” He says the law makes no distinction between the sexes. Isn’t that jolly feminist of him? “Were special consideration shown to women we should open the door wide to such activities on the part of women, who are often more clever in such matters than the cleverest male spy.”

Two Germans, Robert Fay (a lieutenant in the German Army) and Walter Scholz, are arrested in New Jersey after attempting to buy picric acid. The two are suspected of several acts of explosive-type sabotage of trains, merchant ships carrying munitions to Europe, and ammunition factories. In fact, they never got that far, but they were building explosive devices designed to take out ships’ rudders. More Germans and German-Americans will be arrested tomorrow, some for supplying the active agents with funds. After holding out under Secret Service interrogation for... minutes... Fay and Scholz confess to everything, including having received German Secret Service money. However Lt Fay says that Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed, the attachés at the German embassy in the US, refused to have anything to do with planting mines on ships in US harbors and suggested he do his sabotage in Canada instead (von Papen would claim after the war that they suspected Fay of being an English spy). The two would be sent to jail, but Fay escaped the Atlanta federal pen in August 1916 and, with the help of funds from von Papen, crossed into Mexico and eventually from there to Spain, where authorities sent him back to the US, where he went back to prison. He was released and deported in 1922. Here’s a more detailed account of the plot.

South African Prime Minister Louis Botha wins parliamentary elections, in a decisive victory for his pro-war policy.

John Albrecht Walz, a German lit professor at Harvard, calls a convention of 26 German-American organizations to encourage them to work against Woodrow Wilson’s re-election.

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Today -100: October 24, 1915: Why Bulgaria fights

The Bulgarian government distributes a manifesto explaining why Bulgaria chose the side it did. What it comes down to is that the country has more foreign trade with Germany, Austria and Turkey than with the Allies. If young Bulgarian men don’t gladly march off to their deaths to ensure the continuance of dairy exports, I just don’t know what’s wrong with them. Also, it says, Serbs are total dicks and it would be fun to kill some of them (I paraphrase). It makes a rather better negative case for not joining the Allies, saying the Bulgarian army would be working for the territorial aggrandizement of Russia and Serbia without gaining much in return, especially since Serbia is unwilling to give up any land at all (such as the Bulgarian land it annexed after the Second Balkan War). Also, too, it thinks the Central Powers will win.

A women’s suffrage parade is held on Fifth Avenue in New York City ahead of next month’s referendum. The NYT counts 20,789 women marchers, 2,539 men, 74 women on horseback, 870 in cars, and 1,068 musicians in 57 bands.

One banner, which I don’t have a picture of, read “Make New York White.” Referring to the suffrage color, really.

Here’s historian Jean Baker’s blog post on the parade. With more pictures.

Texas ranchers along the Mexican border are demanding that the government either protect them from Mexican bandits or give them immunity from prosecution for crossing into Mexico to steal their cattle back.

Cricket dude W.G. Grace dies.

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Today -100: October 23, 1915: It was not a mere coincidence that two-thirds of the accused were women

British Munitions Minister David Lloyd George says woman munitions workers will get equal pay for skilled work.

Evidently the pope is protesting to Kaiser Wilhelm about the execution of Edith Cavell because executing women is against the principles of Christianity and humanity.

Greece rejects the Allies’ offer of Cyprus in exchange for joining the war.

Germany bans the sale of all meat two days a week (including in restaurants), of pork on another day, and bans the sale in restaurants of food prepared in any form of fat on a different two days. Germany comes a little late to rationing and will never be as efficient about it as the British, which is cited as one reason they will (Spoiler Alert!) lose the war.

A Dutch newspaper is reporting that Edith Cavell’s firing squad aimed not to kill her, with only one bullet from the 12 men hitting her, so she had to be finished off by an officer. None of this is true. “The priest who was present at the execution, overcome with horror, is now suffering from a nervous breakdown.”

A Berlin newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung, paints a picture of a vast organized conspiracy centered on Cavell’s nursing school. “During the trial... the accused, almost without exception, gave the impression of persons cleverly simulating naïve innocence. It was not a mere coincidence that two-thirds of the accused were women.” In other words, they were trying to make Germany look bad if it executed them. Mission accomplished, then.

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Today -100: October 22, 1915: A crime dwarfing even that of the Lusitania

At a Trafalgar Day service in the Church of St. Martin’s in the Fields, the Bishop of London calmly discusses the execution of Edith Cavell: “Their foulest and latest crime was the murder in cold blood of a poor defenseless English girl – a crime dwarfing even that of the Lusitania. This will settle the matter once and for all about recruiting in Great Britain. ... God’s curse is on a nation, however disciplined and efficient, that tramples under foot and openly defies the laws of chivalry which once relieved the horrors of war.”

The report of US Ambassador to Belgium Brand Whitlock suggests that the Germans failed to keep their promise to keep him informed of Cavell’s trial and executed her “despite our best efforts”. Actually, his best efforts were pretty feeble.

Wireless messages cross the Atlantic for the first time. Transmissions from Arlington, Virginia are heard in Paris (also Honolulu).

Germany will fine any Belgian town which is bombed by the Allies.

Turkey counter-charges that the (rapidly diminishing) Armenian population took part in barbarous acts against Muslims, aiding Russian troops.

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