Today -100: January 20, 1917: But is it good for the Jews?

Gen. Pershing’s expeditionary forces in Mexico seem to be pulling out, following the failure of talks with Mexico, but no official announcement has been made.

The TNT in a munitions plant in Silvertown, near London, blows up, killing 73. Fortunately, it was in the evening, just before 7 pm, so the factory had relatively few workers, and it was also too early for people in nearby houses to have gone to bed, many of those houses losing their upper floors.

Headline of the Day -100:

Well, Jewish bankers anyway, who will be needed to aid in reconstruction. Taft may think all Jews are bankers. Anyway, he thinks Russia, Germany, Austria and Romania will definitely be treating Jews much better than they have.

World War I still lacks a name. One member of the French Chamber of Deputies, Jules Roche (a former commerce minister), suggests it be called “the German invasion.” And by “suggests” I mean he wants to impose legal penalties on anyone who calls it anything else.

---

Another issue of The Wipers Times, under its current nom de trench The B.E.F. Times, is out, and it has a pressing concern. The editors have heard a “terrible rumour” that whiskey will soon be na-poo*   “[A]s the sub-editor crudely puts it ‘No whiskey, no war.’”

*No more; from the French “il n’y a plus”.

An Appeal

There are various kinds of courage, there are many kinds of fear,
There are many brands of whiskey, there are many makes of beer,
There is also rum, which sometimes in our need can help us much,
But ’tis whiskey – whiskey – whiskey! hands the courage which is “Dutch.” ....

’Tis Scotland’s best which helps me rest, ’tis Mountain Dew which stays me
When Minnies* rack my wearied soul, or blatant H.E.* flays me,
’Twas by its aid that I endured Trones Wood and such-like places.
In times of stress my truest friend accelerated my paces.

*Minnies = trench mortars.
*H.E. = high explosives.

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Today -100: January 19, 1917: The glory of the Polish sword

Switzerland is worried that Germany is about to send troops through it into Alsace.

The US military forces occupying the Dominican Republic are now deciding who represents the country abroad, firing its ambassador to the United States, claiming it is to reduce expenses, which would be more believable if they hadn’t also just fired the chargé d’affaires in Cuba, who has been protesting the American occupation (and who refuses to accept the authority of the US to fire him).

The Polish Provisional Council (aka the puppet regime named by Germany and Austria) say they’ll get around to a constitution and elections and a king, but the first order of business is to create “a numerous, well disciplined Polish Army, true to our great chivalrous traditions and the glory of the Polish sword”. But they realize conscription for a servile army is not possible, at this time. Germany has graciously provided Poland with a viceroy, Prince Wacław Niemojowski.

New York State plans to create the country’s first prison for “feeble-minded criminals,” not counting the Texas Legislature.

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Today -100: January 18, 1917: Of notes, u-boat agitations, and POWs

Britain sends a new note to Woodrow Wilson, providing justifications for the Entente’s peace conditions. Basically, to prevent the horrible, aggressive countries who are of course solely responsible for starting the war from acting up in the future, the map of Europe needs to be changed to neuter them.

Headline of the Day -100:

Germany claimed France is holding German POWs near the front lines and warned that if France didn’t move them at least 30 kilometers from the front, French POWs would be moved to the front. Its deadline has passed, so it is now doing so.

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Today -100: January 17, 1917: A silent invitation to the assassin

Admiral George Dewey, who took Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, dies.

The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage says that the suffragists picketing the White House are “a menace to the life of the President - a silent invitation to the assassin.”

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Today -100: January 16, 1917: We cannot afford to give the impression that we are chasing peace at all costs

The US-Mexican Joint Commission dissolves after four months of discussions which were never going to accomplish anything, and which didn’t.

German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann says that the Entente’s reply to Wilson’s note has made it impossible for Germany to name its own peace conditions. See if you can follow the logic: the peace terms that the Entente named in response to Wilson were so extreme that if Germany now named its terms, their very mildness and reasonableness would be taken as a sign of weakness, which would just encourage the enemy to keep fighting. “We cannot afford to give the impression that we are chasing peace at all costs.” He suggests that if England’s goal is, as it says, liberation rather than pillaging, it should set an example by freeing Ireland.

The Supreme Court upholds the Mann Act, which is supposed to regulate commercialized prostitution (“white slavery”), but is often used to prosecute any couple who cross state lines for sexual escapades. Since Congress only claims the power to enact this law under the Inter-State Commerce Clause, it’s hard to see the Court’s logic in counting sex where no money exchanges hands as “commerce.”

Boston financier Thomas Lawson, testifying before the House Rules Committee’s investigation of the rumor that cabinet member(s) leaked Wilson’s peace proposals to stock speculators names names, including Treasury Secretary (and Wilson’s son-in-law) William Gibbs McAdoo and his banker brother Malcolm (who wants William to punch Lawson’s head), Wilson’s secretary Joseph Tumulty, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and financier Bernard Baruch. The witness names as his source the – hey, wait a minute! – chairman of the Rules Committee, Robert Lee Henry (D-Texas). Henry denies this. Lawson says he talked to journalists about their conversation immediately after it occurred and shouts, “I’ll make good here, and I won’t go to jail as the goat.”

The New York City Health Department’s campaign against spitting continues. 174 men (no women) appear in court. 2 have acceptable excuses, the rest are fined $1 or $2.

German Foreign Minister Zimmermann sends a telegram to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, informing him that Germany intends to resume unrestricted warfare on February 1st and instructing him that if the United States looks like declaring war in response, Eckhardt should propose an alliance with Mexico against the US – “make war together, make peace together” – promising Mexico the return of territories lost in the Mexican-American War. Well, some of them, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. California would go to Japan, which Mexico should ask to join (Zimmermann thought Japan might be amenable due to annoyance at racist immigrant and land ownership laws in the US). The Zimmermann Telegram will be intercepted and decrypted by British Naval Intelligence as it wends its way through transatlantic cables that fortuitously pass through Britain, the British will pass it to the Americans, and away we go.

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Today -100: January 15, 1917: Welcome, Leon

Du Pont insists that the explosion of their Haskell, New Jersey munitions plant was not the result of a plot. No, just us being incompetent as usual, they say reassuringly.

Czar Nicholas fires a bunch of (relative) liberals from the Council of the Empire, replacing them with reactionaries, as was the custom.

Headline of the Day -100:

Leon Trotsky arrives in New York, having been successively expelled from Russia (technically he escaped from Siberia – twice), Austria (not Germany) at the start of the war, France (for publishing an anti-war newspaper) and Spain. This is almost certainly the first time the NYT has mentioned Trotsky, presumably prodded by the big deal that Russian-language and socialist newspapers in the city are making about his arrival. Interesting that the NYT keeps mentioning his Jewishness; “pacifist” is also a funny way to describe Trotsky.

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Today -100: January 14, 1917: A series of tubes

A letter from Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, gives anecdotal evidence for her claim that corruption and vote-buying were responsible for the defeat of women’s suffrage in state referenda.

The House votes to ignore the postmaster-general’s recommendations and restore pneumatic mail tube deliveries, because they’re awesome.

The US Justice Dept has heard that one person might be responsible for the explosions last week at two different New Jersey munitions factories. The evidence is pretty thin.

War is Hell, Sunday New York Times Magazine Edition:

The New York City Health Department is undertaking a crackdown on people who spit, issuing summonses to 206 alleged spitters in a single day.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Yeah, it’s a swim meet between the Princeton and University of Pennsylvania teams, but for a moment there...

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Today -100: January 13, 1917: Our enemies have dropped the mask

Kaiser Wilhelm responds to the Entente’s rejection of his feeble peace feelers: “Our enemies have dropped the mask, admitted their lust of conquest and their aim to crush Germany and enslave Europe and the seas... but they will never achieve their aim. ... Burning indignation and holy wrath will redouble the strength of every German. God, who planted the spirit of freedom in German hearts, will give us the full victory.”

Enslave the seas?

The Canadian Car and Foundry Company says it will rebuild its Kingsland, New Jersey munitions plant after all that exploding. Kingsland, New Jersey would prefer that it didn’t. While only a few houses burned down, most of them were perforated by projectiles. The company is beginning to insinuate that the fire was deliberate.

And there’s another massive explosion at another munitions plant in New Jersey, the Du Pont powder plant in Haskell. 2 dead. At this point a Du Pont plant blowing up hardly even qualifies as news.

The New York State Bar Association decides to allow women lawyers to join.

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Today -100: January 12, 1917: Of lubes and lynchings, picketers, fireworks in the Meadowlands, and not exterminating the German people

Gov. Augustus Owsley Stanley of Kentucky personally prevents the lynching of a black man, Lube Martin (that can’t be his correct name, can it?), after his trial for killing a white man is postponed. Hearing of the threats to kill the judge if he didn’t order Martin returned to Murray (that’s a place), Gov. Stanley charters a special train, saying he’d give the mob “a chance to lynch the governor of Kentucky first.”

The Senate passes a measure to ban from the US mails printed matter – including newspapers – containing liquor ads.

Pres. Wilson invites the suffragist picketers inside to get warm because, well, January might not have been the best time of year to start picketing the White House. The invitation is not accepted.

Explosions destroy the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, a munitions factory in Kingsland, New Jersey (the Meadowlands), going on and on for four hours as hundreds of thousands of shells, intended for export to Britain and Russia, detonate. No one will ever be sure whether sabotage was involved, although West Germany will be coerced into paying some compensation in the 1950s. There is a hero: Tessie McNamara, who ran the telephone switchboard and made sure every department evacuated before barely making it out herself. There were no casualties, not even the police chiefs of Kingsland and Rutherford, who were in an automobile when a shell fell on it and wrecked it. Not helping: the idiots, not all of them children, who decide that unexploded shells make good souvenirs.

After last July’s explosions in New York Harbor, NY and NJ tightened their rules for the handling of explosives. One of the companies fighting local safety measures was, you guessed it, the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, which went to court to preserve its ability to ship explosives by rail through Jersey City.

The Entente finally responds  to Wilson’s letter sent 4 weeks ago asking both sides to set out their objectives, and they actually do: evacuation of foreign occupation forces from Belgium, Serbia, France, Russia, Montenegro, Romania with reparations, the “reorganization of Europe,” return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and some territory to Italy, “liberation” of Slavs, Romanians (they mean Transylvania), Italians, Czecho-Slovaks (i.e. the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), enfranchisement of subject populations in the Ottoman Empire and the removal from Europe of that Empire, “decidedly alien to Western civilization.” They are positioning themselves as “not fighting for selfish interests, but, above all, to safeguard the independence of peoples, of right, and of humanity.” They do say that they do not aim for “the extermination of the German people and their political disappearance,” so that’s nice of them.

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Today -100: January 11, 1917: So petty and so monstrous

The suffragist picketing of the White House (“silent sentinels”) begins. A new tactic in the US, though in Britain the Women’s Freedom League picketed Parliament in 1909 and have just resumed while the Speaker’s Conference discusses various possible changes to the electoral system. Pres. Wilson, returning from golf, ignores them. Carrie Chapman Catt denounces the sentinels, because of course she does. The NYT says “no one can imagine the Socialists, the Prohibitionists, or any other party conceiving of a performance at once so petty and so monstrous”. The Times thinks this tactic shows the essential difference of the female mind which would make granting women the vote a political danger.

New Russian Prime Minister Prince Nikolai Golitsyn says his government is responsible only to the will of the tsar, not to the Duma (not to mention the Russian people.  Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t mention the Russian people).

The federal court in San Francisco finds the German consul, the amusingly named Franz Bopp, the vice-consul and 3 employees of the consulate, guilty of conspiracy to blow up ammunition factories in the US and Canada as well as ships, railroad bridges, and military trains (the latter coming under the legal heading of conspiring to restrain interstate and international commerce).

The Entente forces the pope to send his First Acting Private Chamberlain, who is German, out of Rome.

A private in the New York National Guard’s Second Field Artillery is punished by being tied to the wheel of a gun carriage (“tricing” or “spreadeagling”), which is old-school discipline. There will be an investigation. The private had been arrested for returning to the Bronx armory drunk, and then refusing to do prison-type work unless fed. The unit, just returned from Texas, has not been paid for weeks and hasn’t been fed in a while either.

Ibsen’s Wild Duck (1884) is performed for the first time in the United States. In German.

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, slaughterer of bison and Indian alike and mythologizer of the Old West through his cowboys & Indians touring show, dies at 70.

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Today -100: January 10, 1917: Of silent sentinels, trepovs, and prohibition

Suffragists plan to picket the White House.

Alexander Fyodorovitch Trepov resigns as Russian prime minister, figuring that almost 7 weeks in that job is enough for anyone. Next up: Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, who is appointed over his own objections by the tsar, who wants an extremely reactionary prime minister, and an extremely reactionary prime minister he will have. For now.

The Senate passes a bill for prohibition in the District of Columbia, 55-32. A proposal to let the actual people of DC vote on it fails by a tie vote.

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Today -100: January 9, 1917: Wars of murder and rapine are the worst kind

A British court in India sentences 17 Indians in the 1915 “Lahore conspiracy” to overthrow the Raj (aka the Ghadar Mutiny). 6 are sentenced to death (actually a lot more than that were executed). The court says the movement originated in the United States in conjunction with the German consulate in San Francisco (which is actually true). “The enemy’s plan was to bring about a war of murder and rapine.”

Sen. Robert Owen (D-Oklahoma) introduces a joint resolution to remove the Supreme Court’s power to declare federal laws unconstitutional. In a speech a couple of days ago, Owen said that the Court is an “antiquated institution” which has outlived its usefulness. He objects to their getting to rule on the Adamson 8-Hour Act.

Chicago Police Superintendent Charles Healey and several others are arrested for taking payoffs from brothels, thieves, gamblers, etc. A raid ordered by the state attorney grabs up bagman Thomas Costello, who has on him a book detailing which places could be raided and which could not. At his trial in October, Healey was represented by Clarence Darrow, who put the blame on Costello, on Mayor Big Bill Thompson, on anyone other than Healey. Darrow had him come to court practically in rags and called him “old, weary, feeble, and broken” (he was c.61, but would live to c.103) and got him acquitted.

The Supreme Court upholds the ban on liquor shipments from wet states to dry ones.

The AP is suing Hearst’s International News Service for stealing its stories through bribery and other nefarious means.

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Today -100: January 8, 1917: Why, the trenches are almost like a health resort, what with the mud baths and everything

Lord Northcliffe claims that the average death rate among British soldiers is 3 per thousand per year and their rate of illness is less than among civilians in London.

Former Greek finance minister Alexandros Diomidis, who has defected to the Venizelos side, says that King Constantine is only waiting for German orders before declaring war on the Entente.

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Today -100: January 7, 1917: Of hitherto unsuspected peoples, leaks, and boards of education

The various statements made by the Entente in favor of the protection of small states (Belgium, Serbia, etc) and peoples, as well as similar statements from the Central Powers (Poles, the Flemish), cynical and instrumental as they are, have “brought to the surface the claims of many peoples whose very existence has been hitherto unsuspected.” Lithuanians, Croats, Ukrainians, etc in the United States have been putting forward claims to independence. Also “Jugoslavs” (southern Slavs), a term I don’t think I’ve seen in the NYT before.

Oh, Congress is serious about investigating the rumor that Wilson’s peace note was leaked to Wall Street in advance. There’s no real evidence to date that there was a leak.

NY Mayor Mitchel appoints a negro, E.P. Roberts, to the Board of Education. Roberts is a doctor who has been a medical inspector for the Board. There was a negro on the Board once before, in the 1890s. It’s unclear how many members the board has; more than 10 anyway. Mitchel has 10 seats to fill and appointed Roberts first, presumably in case other choices objected to working with a black man.

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Today -100: January 6, 1917: The mystery of Rasputin and the wolfhound

Everyone in Russia is still talking about Rasputin’s mysterious death and related mysteries like Who killed the dog in Prince Yusupov’s house? Was he given a revolver (Rasputin, not the dog) and told to kill himself but instead he shot at one of the conspirators and hit the dog?

The Senate votes to endorse Wilson’s note to the belligerents. Well, to support the part calling on them to state their war aims but not the bit about creating an international agreement to keep the peace, which might involve the United States actually doing something. Some Republicans propose a substitute hoping for peace without mentioning Wilson at all; it fails 36-27.

Pres. Wilson nominates a woman to the United States Employees’ Compensation Commission: Frances Axtell, a Republican former state legislator in Washington.

The appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court orders the dismissal of a supervising nurse in the NYC health Department for being an alien (a German), despite the fact that she has the most supervising-nursey name ever, Eugenia S. Prengel.

NYPD Patrolman Hugh McKiernan dies, supposedly as the result of a disease contracted from being bitten six months ago by a man he was arresting.

Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, says that women’s suffrage has been thwarted by fraud in at least 5 states, noting that the majority of states make no legal provision for challenging fraud in referenda or forcing recounts, so that even proof of rampant corruption wouldn’t overturn a rigged election result. She doesn’t name the 5 states or as far as I can tell offer any evidence of actual corrupt ballot practices.

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Today -100: January 5, 1917: Wherein is named a blessing of war

Germany promised to return some of the Belgians it deported to Germany for forced labor. If they’ve done so, I haven’t heard about it, but they are returning 70 tuberculosis cases. In a slow cattle car.

Russian censorship is relaxed to allow newspapers to “publish all conceivable versions” of the death of Rasputin.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: January 4, 1917: Of romantic killings, brutal Senegalese negroes, princes, consuls, and improper promotions

Headline of the Day -100:

Germany complains that its POWs in Africa are being over-worked, mistreated and “are guarded by colored troops with brutality characteristic of the Senegal negroes.” German prisoners are even whipped by negro guards, they claim.

Pancho Villa supposedly shot his secretary for sending out a manifesto, I guess in Villa’s name.

There sure are a lot of German princes, although there’s now one less. Prince Friedrich zu Fürstenberg, 18, was killed in the fighting in Romania late last year.

Mexico’s consul general in New York, Juan Burns, is arrested in the US for arranging arms shipments to Mexico.

Mary Cornwallis-West, who is a former under-aged mistress of Prince Edward, the wife of  the lord-lieutenant of Denbighshire, mother of a princess (in someplace called Pless, in Silesia)(Princess Daisy, she’s called) and also mother of Winston Churchill’s step-father (who may or may not have been Prince Edward’s biological son), is censured by a military Court of Inquiry for interfering to secure the transfer and promotion of a soldier, presumably her boy-toy. The British press will eat this up with a spoon. She sounds like her life would make an excellent book, although evidently the actual book about her life is not that book.

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Today -100: January 3, 1917: Of mad monks, governors, and generals

Headline of the Day -100:

This is not the first time Rasputin’s been reported murdered nor the first time somebody’s actually tried to kill him, so the Times is treating the report with cautious scepticism. 

Arizona Gov. George Hunt refuses to give up his office to the other Arizona governor, Thomas Campbell, so Campbell rents a temporary office in which to attempt to govern. The Post Office has decided that any mail addressed to “the governor of Arizona” will go to Campbell.

The new French Minister of War Hubert Lyautey fires 11 generals, replacing them younger men with experience in this war.

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Today -100: January 2, 1917: The man who has come to regard the ballot box as a juggler’s hat has renounced his allegiance

Headline of the Day -100:

Turkey abrogates the Treaty of Paris (1856) and the Treaty of Berlin (1878). I think that means they’re restarting the Crimean War. Turkey says the promises of the signatories to guarantee her sovereignty were always ignored anyway. Turkey will also abolish the semi-autonomous status of the Christian province of Liva in the Lebanon.

The news of Grigori Rasputin’s murder is out. He is said to have been “assassinated under dramatic circumstances,” as opposed to the usual humdrum, boring assassinations.

Arizona still has two governors. Thomas Campbell takes the oath. In his “inauguration” speech, Campbell says “The man who has come to regard the ballot box as a juggler’s hat has renounced his allegiance.” Yeah... what? “My office is the saddle; I am the governor of Arizona.” Unfortunately, he is then refused entrance into his saddle in the Executive offices, supposedly because it’s the New Year’s holiday and everything’s closed.

Berlin, Ontario changed its name to Kitchener last year. First there was a referendum on whether to change the name, in which a name change won by a very low turnout, then a second low-turnout referendum chose between Kitchener, Brock, Corona, Adanac (Canada spelled backwards), Benton, and Keowana. But not everyone was happy with the idea, and the Citizens’ League has just been voted into power in the city, with a mandate to change the name back, provoking a riot by soldiers.

Police in Long Island City disrupt New Year’s Day festivities, namely cock-fighting. The organizer, a Simon Flaherty, says the birds were sent to him for reshipment and he had no idea about the fighting part. Which doesn’t quite explain what 40 roosters were doing in a second-story hotel room.

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Today -100: January 1, 1917: Of dark forces, enduring Newfoundland sober, idiots, field marshals (fields marshal?), and vehicular slaughter

The Russian Duma deplores the “dark forces” undermining the war effort.

Prohibition goes into effect in Newfoundland.

Politically Correct Headline of the Day -100:

Douglas Haig is promoted to field marshal to reward his many achievements in senseless slaughter.

In 1916, 729 people died in automobile accidents in New York State (a record), 392 of those in NYC.  248 of those were children. Another 78 people were run over by trolleys in the City and 74 by horse-drawn wagons.

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