Today -100: September 15, 1916: Tanks! We got tanks!

It’s a big day on the Somme. The British use tanks for the first time.

Slow (maybe 3 miles per hour) and prone to breaking down and getting stuck, they were still pretty terrifying. Of the 49 tanks, 17 never started, and only 9 made it to the German lines. Still a few kinks to be worked out.

Also on the Somme, the prime minister’s son, Lt. Raymond Asquith, is killed. 37, he was a scholar, lawyer, and former president of the Oxford Union. His father tried to keep him off the front lines by getting him a cozy staff position but he got himself transferred back, with fatal consequences.

And Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister (1957-63), is badly wounded and stranded in a shell-hole in No Man’s Land. While awaiting rescue he read Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and took morphine, as was the custom. He’ll spend the rest of the war in hospital.

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis resigns, evidently pissed off that just as negotiations were beginning with the Entente over Greece possibly entering the war, the Allied fleet showed up to say “Please hello.” King Constantine asks Demetracopulos to form a new cabinet, but he refuses, evidently vetoed by France and Britain.

Cops raid an IWW meeting in Scranton, Pennsylvania and arrest everyone in the hall, 318 persons. There’s a strike at one company’s coal mines.

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Today -100: September 14, 1916: Restless and inclined to change

Following that crash caused by scabs yesterday and the subsequent revelations about how untrained many of the strikebreaking street car operators were, the New York Railways Company fires 1,000 of them as well as the “detective agencies” that supplied them. However the company’s assertion that the operators it will be using, many of them currently employed in its offices, are entirely qualified is less than reassuring, as is its inability to say just what the previously dismissed car operators who are now being hired back were dismissed for. “A good many of them simply got restless and inclined to change,” the company president asserts. So that’s okay then.

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Today -100: September 13, 1916: Of dorseys and street car scabs

Hugh Dorsey, proud prosecutor of Leo Frank, wins the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia, and effectively the governorship, defeating incumbent Gov. Nat Harris (a Confederate vet).

The strikebreakers hired to run NYC subways, street cars and elevated trains are not happy, in part because they are being paid less than they were promised when they were recruited from as far away as Chicago. And it turns out many of them don’t have much if any experience running choo choos. A scab motorman and a scab conductor are held after they lose control of a car going down a hill in the Bronx, crashing into an automobile and killing three men and injuring a bunch more. The motorman turns out not to have known how to operate the brakes, which would seem to be kind of essential.

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis resigns, but the king persuades him to stay on. The Greek government is fracturing.

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Today -100: September 12, 1916: Of polio, shirker raids, Hebrews, bridges, and Lees

New York City polio death toll = 2,123. Public schools will finally be allowed to open on September 25th, and all other restrictions on children (movie theaters, pools, etc) will be ended on the same date, just to rub it in.

A Greek “National Defense Army” is forming, to aid the Entente. It is not authorized by the government.

British police and military raid the Marylebone train station and haul away 180 military-age men they suspect of evading the draft. 179 had exemption papers (which they had to get family members to bring to the police station) and 1 was exempt as a conscientious objector.

Hugh Dorsey, running for governor of Georgia largely on the basis of his zealous prosecution of Leo Frank, accuses Jews (he seems to prefer the term “Hebrew”) of raising a slush fund to defeat him and secretly meeting with former Gov. Slaton, who commuted Frank’s sentence and was then virtually run out of the state (there is no secret slush fund and there was no meeting). His campaign and his supporters have been anti-Catholic as well as anti-Semitic.

A span of the under-construction Quebec Bridge falls into the St Lawrence as it is being raised into place. This is the second time this has happened on this spot in the last decade, though only 13 construction workers were killed this time compared to 75 in 1907.

A rally at the Hotel Astor of the Women’s City Committee of the Hughes Alliance was slightly marred by a Southern woman who stormed out after spotting 3 black women, proclaiming that she couldn’t possibly sit with – yes, she used the n–word – because she’s the great-great-granddaughter of Robert E. Lee.

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Today -100: September 11, 1916: Of zaimises, red pepper, and hand grenades

Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis confers with ambassadors from the Entente countries about Greece maybe possibly joining the war.

4 prisoners in the West Side Prison in NYC escape by throwing red pepper into the eyes of a guard, then beating him. 2 are quickly recaptured.

James O’Hara a British soldier who was invalided out, shouts at neighbors at his Glasgow tenement building to be quiet. When they don’t, he chucks a hand grenade at them, killing 2.

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Today -100: September 10, 1916: He made as clean a promise as ever a man made

Suffragists of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association feel “universal satisfaction” over Woodrow Wilson’s remarks to their convention yesterday. “He made as clean a promise as ever a man made,” says Anna Howard Shaw, probably non-sarcastically.

The Fund for Starving Children (of New York) claims that 14 million Poles have died since the start of the war from starvation, disease etc. including every single child under 7. This may be a slight exaggeration.

Headline of the Day -100:

And mushrooms. Germans are trying to gather berries and mushrooms to store for the winter so they don’t, you know, starve, but landowners are not cooperating.

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Today -100: September 9, 1916: I have come here to fight with you

Woodrow Wilson addresses the national convention of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. “I have come here to fight with you,” he says ambiguously.

Theodore Kaftan, head of the Prussian Protestant Church, hopes hundreds of zeppelins will bomb England. For world peace, you know.

Wilson signs a law giving a $20 per month pension to widows of Civil War vets when they reach 70 (sooner if their husband died during the war).

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Today -100: September 8, 1916: Supplying the ginger

The US Senate ratifies the purchase of the Danish West Indies and its inhabitants.

The Republican Party has asked Theodore Roosevelt to play a bigger role in the Hughes campaign and make more speeches in marginal states to “take off his coat and supply the ginger which is lacking in Candidate Hughes’s speeches,” as one member of the campaign committee put it.

Headline of the Day -100:

Inexperienced elevated operators employed during the strike in New York, not actual green... elevated... men.

The Allen County, Ohio, Grand Jury indicts 16 members of the Lima, Ohio lynch mob that assaulted the sheriff. 

Henry Ford sues the Chicago Tribune for calling him an anarchist for firing his workers in the National Guard deployed to the Mexican border (which, too, also, he didn’t actually do).

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Today -100: September 7, 1916: Of strikes, baffled mosquitos, and blasphemies

Street car/subway strike in New York, so the NYT may be distracted for a while.

The president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad says it will defy the 8-hour act until the Supreme Court – none of your lesser courts, mind you – orders it to do so. It seems Congress failed to put in enforcement provisions because they didn’t imagine the railroads would outright refuse to obey the law.

Headline of the Day -100:

Don’t click on the link; the imagery the headline invokes is far superior to the dull reality.

The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association convention decides to change none of its policies, you know, the ones that haven’t been working the last few years. It won’t drop its non-partisan stance (which in practice would have meant supporting the Republicans, since the Southern-dominated Democrats are opposed to the federal amendment or any federal interference with their sexist voting laws that might lead to federal interference with their racist voting laws). The convention rejects motions to concentrate solely on federal or solely on state suffrage measures.

Lord Alfred Douglas – yes, Oscar Wilde’s Bosie – applies for a blasphemy summons against Irish novelist George Augustus Moore (or, as Amazon.com deems him, a teacher of automotive technology at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colorado) for his new book The Brook Kerith (about a Jesus who didn’t die on the cross and, um, became a Buddhist). The magistrate refuses to issue a summons, saying that Moore has a perfect right to write based on the assumption that Jesus was merely a man.

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Today -100: September 6, 1916: You are the victim of your natural and human weakness

Although denying that signing the railroad 8-hours bill on a Sunday was unconstitutional, Pres. Wilson signs it again on Monday.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: There are rumors that the German commercial, non-military submarine Bremen has been captured by the British. In fact, the Bremen has disappeared mysteriously, its fate forever unknown.

As the polio epidemic wanes, movie theaters in New York will now be allowed to admit children as young as 12.

At a demonstration in Athens last week, an address to the king was adopted. Written by former Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, it suggests Constantine is the victim of his “natural and human weakness” and his love of all things German. “You hoped that after a German victory you would be able to concentrate in your own hands the whole power of government and sweep aside our system of liberty.” Basically, Venizelos would like the king to either stop meddling in politics or abdicate. Constantine will abdicate next year in favor of his son Alexander, but will return to the throne in 1920 when Alexander dies of a monkey bite, as was the custom.

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Today -100: September 5, 1916: Of fair, candid examinations of the facts, romping children, and intolerance

Charles Evans Hughes castigates Wilson for preventing the railroad strike, siding with the owners’ call for arbitration: “I believe there is no grievance with respect to labor that cannot be settled by a fair, candid examination of the facts.” What a very reasonable-sounding way of denying workers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

Greece gives in to the Allied demands. They’ve handed over control of the mail and telegraphs and are busily rounding up German agents.

Headline of the Day -100:

New York City polio death toll = 2,004.

D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance opens.

Sort of an apology for The Birth of a Nation.

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Today -100: September 4, 1916: All saved; all well

Britain and France, while working at bullying Greece into joining the Entente, in the meanwhile demand control of Greece’s mail service, telegraph, and wireless, claiming that Germany has been hearing details of Allied troop movements through them. They also want German agents expelled from the country and punishment for Greeks who aided them.

Following last month’s clash between Chinese and Japanese troops in Eastern Mongolia, Japan makes several demands on China, including the withdrawal of Chinese troops from the district, indemnities, the granting to Japan of police authority in Inner Mongolia and South Manchuria, Japanese military “advisers” to the Chinese Army and military inspectors in Chinese schools, etc.

Ernest Shackleton retrieves the men he left on Elephant Island, Antarctica. “All saved; all well,” he telegraphs.

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Today -100: September 3, 1916: I had rather be a dog and bay at the moon than to submit to such dictation

The Senate passes the railroad 8-hour bill 43-28. The strike is called off. Railroad companies vow to resist. In fact, they may go to court because it’s totally illegal for a president to sign a bill on a Sunday or national holiday, right? Sen. Jacob Gallinger (R-New Hampshire) says Congress is now no better than the Mexican Congress, simply passing bills the president wants without debate. Sen. Wesley Jones (R-Washington) says “This is the worst thing we could do for the working man.” How so, Sen. Jones? “If Congress can force the employers to pay more wages it can force the employes to take less wages. The principle is exactly the same.” Sen. Lawrence Sherman (R-Illinois) cunningly discovers the real victim in this: “It is the Senate that is being put under involuntary servitude” by the threats of union leaders. “I will either serve as a senator free from dictation or I will not serve at all. I had rather be a dog and bay at the moon than to submit to such dictation”. Well, if those are the options, Sen. Sherman...

Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, by the way, refuses to say anything at all about the railway situation.

There is a riot in St. Thomas, Pennsylvania when health officers, concerned over polio, try to order children under 16 out of an ox roast.

The British authorities ban Bertrand Russell going to... Sussex. Because they (the officer who signed the order is his cousin, by the way) can’t distinguish pacifists from German spies – or pretend they can’t – and think he might, what? signal to u-boats?

By the way, Russell, who is too old to be drafted for this war, will still be doing the pacifist thing 50 years later, marching against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War.

In the NYT Sunday Magazine, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, which is about to hold a convention to examine its goals and methods, explains the current state of the suffrage issue. The cause has won over the churches, the two parties, etc., she says. “Moreover, all the leading names in literature, art, philosophy, science, and business are enrolled on our side. But we have not won the reactionaries. We have not won the illiterate. We have not won the powers of evil”. Reminds me of Adlai Stevenson’s famous line: told that he had the vote of “every thinking person,” he replied, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority.”

Baltimore recently passed an ordinance regulating how and where the Star-Spangled Banner may be sung. It has to be played verbatim, without musical embellishments (and absolutely not in jig time) and not as part of a medley. Musicians and singers should be standing while performing it. Absolutely no dancing to it (people dance to the Star-Spangled Banner?). The city council is denying that anyone who fails to stand while it is played will be fined $100.

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Today -100: September 2, 1916: Of declarations of war, mrogoros, blessings, and servants

Bulgaria declares war on Romania.

British/South African forces seize Mrogoro (aka Morogoro) in German-But-Not-For-Long East Africa. Gen. Jan Smuts issues a statement announcing the fact and informing anyone who hasn’t heard of Mrogoro that it is “a most important town.”

Pres. Wilson’s railroad bill passes the House, with the 8-hour day supported 239 to 56. It moves on to the Senate.

The Vatican denies reports that Pope Benedict sent a telegram congratulating the Austrian emperor on his 86th birthday. There are also reports that at the start of the war Pope Pius refused to bless the Austrian armies.

Headline of the Day -100:

War is hell.

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Today -100: September 1, 1916: All the evils of feeble peace combined with all the evils of feeble war

Lima, Ohio’s county prosecutor asks the governor for troops to head off a race riot after yesterday’s attempted lynching and the torture of the sheriff. All negroes are warned to stay off the streets, although oddly it wasn’t the negroes who were in that lynch mob. The sheriff’s daughter, traumatized when the mob broke into their home, dies of “shock.”

In a speech in Lewiston, Maine, in support of Charles Evans Hughes, Theodore Roosevelt says some less-than-flattering things about Woodrow Wilson, who, re Carranza and Mexico, “did not merely kiss the hand that slapped him in the face, he kissed that hand when it was red with the blood of American men, women, and children”; “This Administration has displayed no more feeling of responsibility for the American women who have been raped, and for the American men, women, and children who have been killed in Mexico, than a farmer shows for the rats killed by his dogs when the hay is taken from a barn.” He denies the claim of Wilson supporters that Wilson “has kept us out of war,” since the capture of Vera Cruz and the Pershing Expedition “were wars, and nothing else; ignoble, pointless, unsuccessful little wars; but wars... his policy in Mexico has combined all the evils of feeble peace with all the evils of feeble war.”

As usual, the Colonel attacks hyphenates, although I think it’s new that he now blames them, somehow, on Wilson: “During the last two years we have seen an evil revival in this country of non-American and anti-American division along politico-racial lines, and we owe this primarily to the fact that President Wilson has lacked the courage and the vision to lead this nation in the path of high duty, and by this lack of affirmative leadership has loosened the moral fibre of our people, has weakened our national spirit”.

Moving on to the European War, he seems to think that if Wilson had been firmer, and lead the neutral nations in demanding the war be fought along civilized lines, Germany would not have invaded Belgium, bombarded churches, sunk ships, executed Nurse Edith Cavell etc, and the Turks wouldn’t be massacring Armenians. Wow.

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Today -100: August 31, 1916: God help you; I can’t

When the heads of 8 major railroads told Woodrow Wilson they reject his proposals to prevent a strike, he told them, “God help you; I can’t.”

Actually, he can. A congresscritter helpfully discovers that there’s a law still on the books from the Civil War allowing the president to take over railroads and court-martial workers who fail to cooperate.

Wilson orders 15,000 state national guardsmen transferred from the Mexican border back to their home states to help with the rail emergency.

A Nebraska judge issues a restraining order against any strike on the Union Pacific. Good luck enforcing that.

The Austrian Crown Prince tells the army that while Romania is now at war with them, “Your upright soldiers’ sense will find adequate contempt for this dilatory assault.”

Polio death count, New York City: 1,911. City College and Cornell postpone the start of the new academic year.

A mob in Lima, Ohio beat up and put a noose around the neck of the sheriff to force him to give up the location of a black prisoner they want to lynch. He takes them, in a convoy of 100 cars, to Ottawa, Ohio, and manages to escape before they found out that the Ottawa cops had already moved the prisoner on.

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Today -100: August 30, 1916: Of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, jail breaks, and choo choo trains

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg is appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff, a staff which is both general and imperial. This puts into place the comedy duo of Hindenburg ‘n Ludendorff, which will run the army and increasingly the country until the end of the war.

German saboteur Robert Fay busts out of the Atlanta federal prison along with an American prisoner in for mail fraud. They pretended to be electricians and a rather trusting guard let them out to repair a wire.

Before a joint session of Congress, Woodrow Wilson presents his proposals to prevent a rail strike: the 8-hour day, a ban on strikes and lockouts while a government board investigates disputes, letting railroads increase their rates to compensate for increased costs, and giving the president the authority to force railroad workers to operate trains transporting troops and military supplies. Congress is dubious, especially about rushing all this legislation through before it adjourns, or indeed before the strike is scheduled to commence. And some Republicans claim the 8-hour day is unconstitutional, because of course they do (the Supreme Court will rule otherwise). This will be the first federal law regulating hours of work in private industry. The unions consider the temporary ban on strikes to amount to slavery, but are mostly okay with the rest of it, you know, the non-slavery bits. Actually, Wilson is talking about giving arbitration decisions the force of law, which seems a little slaveryish, as does literally drafting train crews to run military-related trains.

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Today -100: August 29, 1916: And still more war is declared

Romania declares war on Austria, Germany declares war on Romania, and Austria gets so excited it accidentally declares war on itself. That’s 15 nations/empires at war with each other (don’t forget San Marino!) and 26 or 27 declarations of war.

Romania sets out its reasons: ethnic Romanians in the Habsburg Empire (specifically in Transylvania) are exposed to the hazards of war; Romanian entry will totally shorten the war, possibly by hours; the Entente are best positioned to help Romania realize its national ideal (I think that means annexing Transylvania). Long expected, the declaration seems to have been delayed until the harvest was in.

This (combined with Italy’s declaration of war on Germany) is not good news for the Central Powers, stretching out their forces along an additional 900 miles of front. Also, Romania had been supplying a lot of their oil, as well as wheat and copper. And Germany had been paying them in ammunition, which will now be returned to Germany – at high speed.

The Berliner Tageblatt affects boredom with Italy’s move: “We have waiting for this declaration of war without impatience of unrest, with the same apathy with which one awaits a thunderstorm that is already visible in the sky. Our umbrella has long been raised. In Italy the declaration may be regarded as a great deed, and may be accompanied with the usual demonstration. In Germany it leaves the public ice-cold.”

Supposedly the Austrian authorities in the Chelm District of Poland have banned Jews from traveling. And if Jews keep “spreading for speculative purposes [that is, to affect the prices of goods] alarming rumors” about military conditions, the Jewish community will be fined.

The railroad unions have issued a strike order for September 4th, and Pres. Wilson is not best pleased.

Former President Taft says he walked four city blocks in Chicago and shopped in a store without anyone recognizing him. He says this convinced him that he is through in politics. Evidently he didn’t already know that he is through in politics.

A member of an exclusive London club (which the NYT does not name) breaks  the rule of silence (the Diogenes Club?) to tell a waiter, “Remove that member,” pointing to a member in the next chair who had been dead for three days.

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Today -100: August 28, 1916: More war is declared

Italy declares war on Germany. Given that Italian troops in Greece are already facing German ones and that German troops are reportedly on the Italian borders alongside Austrian ones (which Germany denies), this is just acknowledging a state of war that already exists, and that it was pretty silly to declare war on Austria but not Germany to begin with.

Romania also joins the war on the Allied side, though too late for today’s paper.

The Allies are trying to force Greece to join their side by refusing to do anything about the Bulgarian troops which have invaded Greece. Greece thought playing both sides against each other would make Germany restrain the Bulgarians, but no such luck.

Headline of the Day -100:

Also herring.

Southern tobacco farmers arrive in Washington DC to lobby the State Dept to protest Britain’s embargo of tobacco shipments to the Central Powers. The growers say the British did this just to force down the price of the tobacco they buy from the US.

The Red-Headed League of America is formed. Someone alert Sherlock Holmes.

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Today -100: August 27, 1916: Of sins against the Fatherland, lynchings, Polish relief, nettoyeurs, polio and altar boys, English eyes, and salt

German Food Dictator Adolf Tortilowitz von Batocki-Friebe asks the women of rural Germany to share their agricultural bounty with their urban sisters. “Any one living on the land who consumes even half a liter of milk or a quarter of a pound more of butter or even an egg more than is absolutely necessary sins against the Fatherland.”

A large mob in Vivian, Louisiana, lynch a black man, Jess Hammet, accused by a white woman of attempted rape. Her parents plead with the crowd not to lynch Hammet.

The railroad owners change their position, dropping even the theoretical 8-hour day. It’s almost like they want a strike.

Britain and France are refusing Woodrow Wilson’s request to allow relief supplies to be sent to Poland, unless Germany promises not only to take none of the supplies, but to take none of Poland’s agricultural products for Germany. Which Germany won’t.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Germany claims that the French Army has squads, called “nettoyeurs” (cleaners), whose sole job is to wander around war zones looking for wounded German soldiers to kill.

Deputy sheriffs on Long Island prevent polio victims entering a private isolation hospital in Woodmere, threatening to shoot anyone who tried to bring a patient into the hospital. Crowds of locals are threatening to burn it down.

NY state Supreme Court Justice Carr took over as altar boy at a Catholic Church since the regular altar boys are barred from church because of the polio epidemic.

At an inquiry of some sort in Dublin into the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington during the Easter Rising hears his widow Hannah deny that he was wearing a green uniform (he wasn’t). Her sister Mary Kettle (wife of former MP Tom Kettle, who will shortly die on the Somme) describes Capt. Bowen-Colthurst, who was found guilty but insane, which she obviously doesn’t buy for a minute, as one of the “cold, collected type of Englishman whose eyes showed the cruel, cold look which went with an unimaginative nature.”

A Polish immigrant Benny Niegodowsky, is rescued after 12 days lost in a salt mine in upstate New York. Which is what happens when you decide to take a nap on the job – in a fucking salt mine. He is very thirsty.

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