Today -100: October 19, 1916: Of inconsistent principles and polio

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond introduces a resolution in Parliament declaring that the treatment of Ireland is “inconsistent with the principles wherefor the Allies are fighting in Europe”. He demands immediate Home Rule, the ending of martial law, and the release of prisoners from the Easter Rising (500 still held without trial).

As there were “only” two polio deaths in New York yesterday, the health commissioner has decided the epidemic is over and will stop issuing daily reports.

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Today -100: October 18, 1916: A surrender can’t be repealed

A heckler asks Charles Evans Hughes if he would repeal the Adamson Act, the law which established the 8-hour day in the railroad sector. Hughes says a surrender can’t be repealed. He says if he’d been faced with a threatened rail strike as Wilson was, he’d have appointed a commission so impartial and so fair that neither side would have gone against its recommendations. Oh, Charles Evans, you’re just too pure for this wicked world.

Woodrow Wilson fails to get the belligerents to agree a plan to allow relief supplies into Poland.

The Justice Dept is investigating claims that Republicans are “colonizing” Southern negroes into Illinois and Indiana to register to vote, although Illinois law requires one year of residence to register. However, the article also notes that many of them are taking meat-packing jobs formerly held by immigrants who have returned to Europe to fight, so maybe this is just normal economic migration and racist D’s then, like racist R’s now, just automatically equate black people voting with voter fraud.

Under some sort of deal with Germany, Switzerland bans exports of munitions to the Allies if those munitions are made using German coal or steel.

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Today -100: October 17, 1916: Of provisional governments, lynchings & laudings, operatic menaces, newsprint, and obedient wives

The Allies recognize Eleftherios Venizelos’s “Provisional Government,” although possibly only in Crete?

The NYT has its first picture of a tank.

Two black men are lynched in Paducah, Kentucky. One is accused of attacking a white woman, the other supposedly “lauded” the first’s attack.

Headline of the Day -100:  

There’s a newsprint shortage in the US, so the FTC asks big-city newspapers to cut down the size of their Sunday papers, so as not to put smaller newspapers out of business.

The Episcopalians refuse to remove the word “obey” from the marriage vow for women.

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Today -100: October 16, 1916: Babies vs. dogs

Princeton University is under quarantine after a freshman dies of polio.

Margaret Sanger opens a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brooklyn.

Norway has banned armed submarines from its ports and Germany’s afraid other neutrals will follow suit.

The train of pro-Hughes women continues its campaign tour. In Medford, Oregon, Democratic women planned to bring stray dogs to greet them, but Republican women arranged to bring babies to the train station, because politics.

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Today -100: October 15, 1916: Let the enemy crush his head against a wall of iron

Kaiser Wilhelm visits the troops on the Eastern Front. He tells them “Let the enemy crush his head against a wall of iron. God help you in this great work.” They respond, “So we’re like the wall in this scenario?”

Charles Evans Hughes insists that his “doctrine of firmness” will not lead to war, while Wilson’s policies of weakness and vacillation will.

40 opposition members of the Hungarian Diet who are in the military, including their leader Count Karolyi, are being sent to the front. This seems to be retaliation by the army for their criticism of its mishandling of the war.

Australia will hold a referendum on whether to introduce conscription.

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Today -100: October 14, 1916: And we’ll keep it broken

The Allies demand control over the Greek police, the banning of Greeks carrying arms, and the export of wheat (which is currently prohibited) from Thessaly.

The Greek Navy’s sailors will be turned into an army. When the Allies seized the Navy, the king gave them the option of staying with their ships under French command, but none did.

Bayonne, NJ police break the Standard Oil strike, as was the custom. “We got this strike broken, and we’ll keep it broken,” says Commissioner of Public Safety Henry Wilson.

Greek King Constantine still opposes Greece going to war on the Allied side. He says Romania is about to fall and then, if Greece declares war, the full might of Germany would fall on it.

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Today -100: October 13, 1916: Tall, with a wealth of red hair

The first mention in the NYT that a woman, Jeanette Rankin, is running for Congress. It’s an editorial but it provides rigorous political analysis:

And that’s all the coverage she’ll get in the Times until the votes are being counted.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Russia accuses Germany of dropping poisoned candy and cholera-infected garlic (can you actually infect garlic with cholera?) on Constanza, Romania.

Headline of the Day -100:

He says that when the German embassy put ads in the paper warning passengers, he would have threatened to break relations with Germany, so they wouldn’t have sunk it. Er, he knows the u-boat that sank the Lusi was already at sea, right? And before that, he says, he would have had a State Department that commanded respect around the world.

Eleftherios Venizelos’s self-styled Provisional Government will soon issue orders mobilizing the army.

Otto I, the former Mad King of Bavaria, who reigned from inside his padded throne room from 1886 until he was deposed in 1913, dies.

Woodrow Wilson’s train backed into a crowd in Indiana, but no one was hurt. One woman was saved by Secret Service agent John Q. Slye.

In other news, Woodrow Wilson had a Secret Service agent named John Q. Slye.

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Today -100: October 12, 1916: We want peace that is honorable, that squares with the dignity of American manhood

France seizes the Greek Navy. And we hear again that the Entente is offering nothing to Greece to induce it to enter the war. Not sure why they’re so determined to treat Greece as a vassal rather than a potential partner.

Charles Evans Hughes says as president he would favor no nation, but uphold the rights of neutral countries. Denying that a Republican victory would mean war, he says “We want peace, but we want peace that is honorable, that squares with the dignity of American manhood. We can have that sort of peace a great deal more easily than we can have the other sort of peace, which borders on the cowardly and the loss of the self-respect of the nation.”

Woodrow Wilson seems to have decided that the U-53’s sinking of ships off the US shore doesn’t violate any of Germany’s promises.

Dr. Maxime Ménard of the Hôpital Cochin in Paris receives the Legion of Honor for his work with x-rays in locating shrapnel in soldiers. Oh, and for losing two fingers to cancer in the process. One on each hand; I have been unable to ascertain which fingers.

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Today -100: October 11, 1916: It is not necessary to swing to the maudlin

Armed striking Standard Oil workers are marching around Bayonne, NJ, closing off entire districts and shooting at cops and scabs.

New York Gov. Charles Whitman, speaking to the American Prison Association’s annual congress, indirectly addresses the resignation of Sing Sing warden Thomas Mott Osborne: “In swinging away from the brutal, it is not necessary to swing to the maudlin.” Superintendent of Prisons James Carter says the practical – he emphasizes the word practical – features of Osborne’s system will be retained.

Theodore Roosevelt blames Woodrow Wilson for the German u-boat attacks off the US’s Atlantic coast, because of course he does. Wilson should have stood up to Germany and done... something... right at the start of the war when it invaded Belgium.

Sarah Bernhardt arrives in New York. She will play Cleopatra, but has promised the French prime minister not to perform in anything partisan, like Edmond Rostand’s anti-German play “Les Cathedrals.” Don’t know what that’s about.

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Today -100: October 10, 1916: Of u-boats, bullfights, and retaliation and brutality

There is much talk about what the US can and should do about u-boat activity off its shores. The government thinks none of the sinkings off Nantucket constitute a violation of either international law or Germany’s pledges to limit submarine warfare.

Carranza bans bullfighting in Mexico.

As I may or may not have mentioned, Charles Evans Hughes’s campaign has a trainload of women supporters going around making speeches. The DNC has been alerting locals to expose them as wives of Wall Street and Big Business types (and William Randolph Hearst’s mother).

Thomas Mott Osborne, the reforming warden of Sing Sing, resigns, accusing NY Gov. Charles Whitman of acquiescing in the legal persecution of Osborne and breaking “every promise he ever made to me” and of preferring “the old system of retaliation and brutality.” Osborne accuses the superintendent of prisons of interfering with his reforms without giving them a chance to work (most recently banning lifers who were trusties from leaving prison walls).

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Today -100: October 9, 1916: Of u-boats and gomperses

U-boats sink several ships off the East Coast of the US. One of those u-boats is the very same U-53 that just left port in Rhode Island. Seriously, what was the point of that? It didn’t even take on provisions, just dropped off one letter. The US Navy is busily rescuing survivors. The war has now reached the Western Hemisphere.

Britain will protest to the US for allowing the U-53 to leave dock, an act Britain considers unneutral because it allows the sub to interfere with the shipment of munitions from the US to Britain. There’s a flaw in that logic somewhere, I just can’t put my finger on it.

Samuel Gompers complains to Mexico about Carranza’s recent decree abolishing the right to strike and declaring striking treasonable and punishable by death, no less.

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Today -100: October 8, 1916: Maybe soon, maybe never

Germany plans to court-martial two captured British pilots for using tracer bullets. Britain explains that everyone uses tracer bullets for machine guns, including zeppelins, and hey we captured the crew of a zeppelin just last week and it had tracer bullets, so....

A German u-boat docks in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, to everyone’s surprise. Evidently it made the 17-day voyage just to deliver a letter to the German ambassador to the US, which the captain asks an AP reporter to pop in a mailbox for him. Supposedly the letter is about relief campaigns in Poland, but rumors that the kaiser is asking Wilson to mediate peace inevitably spread. Under the rules of war, the sub can stay in port one day (Britain disagrees with this, saying that submarines are different from ships). Fregattenkapitän Rose says “We expect to reach home maybe soon, maybe never.” Spoiler Alert: He will reach home. During the war, the U-53 has or will sink around 88 ships.

Woodrow Wilson says that the Republicans lack a united set of proposals. “The only distinct definitions of purpose come from the collateral branches of the family” i.e., Teddy Roosevelt, who “professes opinions and purposes at which the rest in private shiver and demur.” Fair enough.

Mihály Károlyi, leader of a Hungarian opposition party, demands the end of the war, or at least Hungary’s participation in it, and for the emperor to dismiss the government of Count István Tisza, which “obtained its majority by corruption and does not represent the nation”.

Germany denies deliberately infecting prisoners of war with tuberculosis.

The NYT says that Russian military censors have allowed all sorts of calumnies about Jews to be published (cowardice as soldiers, evading military service, responsibility by treachery for military defeats, secret agents of the Germans, Jewish doctors maiming wounded soldiers, etc), while suppressing anything that praises the bravery of Jewish soldiers or contradicts the anti-Semitic lies.

Germany is reportedly interested in re-establishing the Vatican as a temporal power (making it independent of Italy).

Headline of the Day -100:

Oh, go fuck yourself, AP reporter who wrote this.

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Today -100: October 7, 1916: Madness, ruin, and disaster

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond says he doesn’t think the government is insane enough to try to introduce conscription in Ireland: “in that way lies madness, ruin, and disaster.” Which sounds like a typical Friday night in... nah, I won’t go there.

Orville Wright will not renew his British patent monopoly when it expires in March, as his contribution to the British war effort. In five months.

Headline of the Day -100:

You do you, Mother Jones, you do you.

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Today -100: October 6, 1916: There is as much fight in America as in any nation in the world

The first lawsuit is filed under California’s 1913 Alien Land Law. The state’s assistant attorney general is trying to seize a house purchased by the Harada family in Riverside.

Since it was bought by the Harada parents in the name of their three American-born children, who are US citizens, the purchase will be ruled (in 1918) as legal. So that’s a nice loophole.

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“The war,” Wilson says, “has obscure European objects which have never been disclosed. Europe must understand that before we exert the force of this nation we want to know what we are exerting it for.” He says that after the war there needs to be a league of nations to preserve peace.

Mother Jones leads a crowd of female relatives of striking NYC carmen in destroying a street car.

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Today -100: October 5, 1916: Have you tried texting them?

Greek King Constantine will form a government of national unity including the Venizelos crowd. The Cabinet resigns to allow this to happen, although their official statement also cites as a reason that they haven’t been able to get in contact with the Entente powers’ representatives.

Corporal Adolf Hitler is seriously wounded by a shell on the Somme. He will be a couple of months recovering, during which he will return to Germany (Berlin and Munich) for the first time in years and will be appalled by the low home-front morale, which he will blame on the, oh you know who.

Tsar Nicholas issues a decree dissolving the marriage of his sister the Grand Duchess Olga to the homosexual Duke Peter of Oldenburg. They were married 15 years, since she was 19. This form of divorce allows her to remarry, which she will do almost immediately to someone who actually was willing to fuck her, which Duke P never did. She’ll be one of the Romanovs to survive the Revolution, emigrating with her husband to Denmark, then Canada, where she died in 1960. Peter will also remarry, another Olga.

A black woman is lynched in Leary, Georgia. She was part of a quarrel during which her son shot and killed a white farmer. He’s still in jail.

An idea is spreading in Britain that after Germany’s inevitable defeat it should be punished in the peace treaty for sinking all those ships by having its own ships seized as compensation on a ton-by-ton basis.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: October 4, 1916: Of hatred, polio, and hand-shaking

Headline of the Day -100:

Sensible sentiments – revenge would sow the seeds of future wars, consult reason and passion, you can’t ban a whole people for all time to come, etc – but a bit laughable coming from Bryce, the man who wrote the propaganda report accusing Germany of fictional war atrocities to gin up anti-German passion and revenge.

Russia gets its fifth Interior Minister in a 10-month period. Outsiders aren’t sure what’s going on.

The feds think the polio epidemic is over and are ending inspection of interstate travel originating in New York City.

Taft and Roosevelt shake hands. After all reporters had been removed from the room. They did not speak, beyond “How d’you do?” or somesuch. Definitely worth a front-page article.

Japanese Prime Minister Okuma resigns, supposedly because of his age.

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Today -100: October 3, 1916: Of ellises, POWs, and golf

Edith Ellis, the novelist, feminist activist, and lesbian wife of sexologist Havelock Ellis dies, having caught a cold watching a zeppelin raid (that’s not quite right, but never mind).

Jamaica doesn’t go ahead with a conscription bill after all, because the governor decided it would be too expensive. The House of Assembly votes to ban enemy aliens from having any business in Jamaica for 20 years after the end of the war.

Germany sent 10,000 French POWs to Russia in retaliation for France sending its POWs to North Africa. Now both sides are backing down.

William Howard Taft is down to a fighting weight of 266 pounds, 100 pounds less than when he was president. He says it’s all due to golf. I presume he’s on an all-golf-ball diet now. Very high in fiber.

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Today -100: October 2, 1916: Of zeppelins and palaces

Britain shoots down a zeppelin north of London, the fourth in the last month. Searchlights, better guns, and experience are making the air raids unproductive for Germany.

The Vatican complains to Italy after it seizes the palace in Rome used by the Austrian ambassador to the Vatican.

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Today -100: October 1, 1916: There is only one choice as against peace and that is war

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech accusing the Republicans of wanting war in both Europe and Mexico. After all, they’re saying that his foreign policy is all wrong, and “There is only one choice as against peace and that is war.” The logic is impeccable.

Theodore Roosevelt says of Wilson’s May 1915 “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight” speech that “In all our history there has never been any other American president who has used a phrase that has done such widespread damage to the good name of America.”

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg’s speech a couple of days ago in the Reichstag declaring that any German politician failing to support the use of all means to shorten the war deserves to be hanged is being taken as signaling the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Emperor Iyasu V of Ethiopia (age 21) is deposed amid rumors that he had converted to Islam (he’s also excommunicated), and replaced by his aunt Zewditu Menelik. Iyasu will make trouble for a few years before being captured. He will die in 1935 during the Italian invasion, possibly killed on the orders of Haile Selassi to prevent him being used as a puppet by the Italians.

Thanks to the polio epidemic, there aren’t enough children to pick cranberries in New Jersey.

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Today -100: September 30, 1916: Of handshakes and outrageous buttons

Former presidents Roosevelt and Taft will both attend a reception for Charles Evans Hughes at the Union League Club, but Roosevelt makes it clear that this will not be a reconciliation with Taft. In fact, he won’t make a move to shake hands with his former war secretary, although he will be in the receiving line so he may have to shake Taft’s hand, but it’ll just be an ordinary hand-shake, it won’t have any special meaning. The event’s organizers have been pushing the reconciliation angle, presumably because it’s more of a draw than boring ol’ Charles Evans Hughes. Roosevelt is also really pissed to hear that there were plans to put out a button with a picture of himself, Taft and Hughes – “outrageous,” he says.

Hughes says he supports the 8-hour day, really he does. No, it’s just the Adamson Bill for railroad workers he opposes, because it will mean an increase in wages, and the public will have to pay for it. I’m not sure who he thinks pays when workers in other industries get fewer hours at the same wages.

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