Today -100: August 7, 1917: Of draft resisters, impeachments, masses, and trotskies

Woodrow Wilson tells Sen. J. Hamilton Lewis that Germany’s peace feelers aren’t genuine and it is not the time to talk peace with it. Wilson also told Lewis that he wants Congress to pass a couple of bills and then adjourn until December, because who needs the legislative branch hanging around being all oversighty when you’re trying to run a war?

The US district attorney in Oklahoma is going to demand the death penalty for 200 draft resisters he is charging with treason.

The impeachment hearing for Texas Gov. James Ferguson hears that he deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funds in a bank in which he is the principal shareholder. And that he had a personal account in it which was overdrawn by more than $30,000.

The Masses is still banned from the US mails, pending appeal, the Circuit Court having overruled Learned Hand’s injunction.

Trotsky is arrested.

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Today -100: August 6, 1917: Of court-martials, confessions of faith, and attempted lynchings

Kerensky withdraws his resignation. But he’s still struggling to put together a cabinet and in particular to get the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) on board. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets are worried that Kerensky’s consolidation of power would reduce their influence. He’s also trying to bring in prominent former exiles like the anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, who will be offered the post of education minister, which he will refuse.

Gen. Kornilov has a general who refused to shoot deserters court-martialed and sentenced to death.

The National Security League (a hyper-loyalist group) demanded that all German-American organizations denounce the German government and tell all their relatives back in Germany that they do so. The groups mostly wrote back to tell the League to go fuck itself. Now it’s demanding that all 450 German-language newspapers subscribe to a “confession of faith” that “the objects of America in this war are noble, unselfish, and that they square with the highest aims of morality and religion” while “the aims of Germany in this war are sordid, selfish, and opposed to the principles of human liberty.” And so on.

Frank La Monte, a Socialist candidate for mayor of Evansville, Indiana, who has been making speeches against conscription, narrowly escapes being lynched.

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Today -100: August 5, 1917: Of commanders and draft resisters

Gen. Kornilov accepts the post of Commander in Chief of the Russian armies, on the condition that he gets absolute control of the war, responsible, in his words, only to his conscience and the people.

In Oklahoma a posse capture that band of draft resisters, killing one. Interestingly, the band seems to have included whites, blacks and Mexicans. There are also anti-draft disturbances in Georgia and North Carolina. The provost marshal general, Gen. Crowder, helpfully points out that anyone who fails to show up and request exemption will be automatically enlisted in the military and if they don’t show up they can be executed.

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Today -100: August 4, 1917: God has been wearing his “laundry day” underwear for 3 years now

Gen. Erdelli, the military governor of Petrograd, is assassinated!

(Update: Or not!)

The Russian government dissolves the Finnish Landtag, which declared independence last month. It says Finland can’t do that unilaterally.

A NYT editorial comes out against the lynching of Frank Little, while suggesting that the IWW are just as bad as the lynchers, indeed saying that the IWW is trying to “lynch the United States.” It scolds, “A civil tongue becomes the disaffected in war. ... It is dangerous to be publicly offensive when popular emotion is strong”. Which sounds an awful lot like “He was asking for it.”

Armed bands of draft resisters roam Oklahoma, supposedly.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: August 3, 1917: Play ball!

More women’s battalions are being set up in Russia.

Christabel Pankhurst, in Britannia: “I consider the Pacifists a disease. They are a disease which comes of over-prosperity, and of false security.”

The Russian government decides not to give the vote to the Romanovs.

Woodrow Wilson says the baseball season shouldn’t be stopped because of the war.

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Today -100: August 2, 1917: Others take notice

Frank Little, one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, is lynched. Six masked men grab him from his boarding house in Butte, Montana, in his underwear, and hang him from a railway trestle. Pinned to his corpse is a card reading: “Others take notice. First and last warning. 3-7-77 L D C S S W T.” The number is a reference to the nineteenth-century Vigilantes of Montana, the initials presumably those of the next men to be murdered. Little had been organizing miners and talking shit about US soldiers (“Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniform”) and the war (“capitalist slaughter fest”). US District Attorney B.K. Wheeler calls the lynching “the most unwise thing that has happened in Butte,” adding that just the day before he’d asked the Attorney General whether he should prosecute Little for those speeches. The identity of the killers remains a mystery to this day, presumably thugs working for Anaconda Copper and/or Pinkertons, but not Dashiell Hammett. Hammett is in Butte as a Pinkerton strikebreaker and later claimed to have been offered $5,000 to murder Little.

Elsewhere in the paper, the NYT claims that IWW leaders are Germans or run by German agents in a campaign to disrupt the war effort. It mentions how important copper is to the war, but fails to mention the deaths in June of 168 miners in a fire at an Anaconda mine, which helped spur the current strike wave.

Impeachment proceedings open against Texas Gov. James Ferguson in a special session of the Legislature that begins with each member being searched for weapons. In addition to the previous charges of embezzlement, etc, the speaker of the House adds a new one: trying to bribe the speaker of the House to stop the impeachment.

The Senate votes 65-20 for a constitutional amendment for prohibition, with a 6-year deadline for ratification by the states.

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Today -100: August 1, 1917: Of sympathetic strikes, lack of sympathy to marriages, and women mayors

The IWW threatens to start sympathetic strikes across the US unless the IWWers deported from Bisbee are returned.

The government is threatening to jail women who marry men subject to the draft.

Headline of the Day -100: 

She was the only candidate in the Democratic primary, nominated over her objections but finally persuaded into taking office. It’s Moore Haven, by the way, not Moorehaven. Marion Horwitz is the first woman mayor south of the Mason-Dixon line.

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Today -100: July 31, 1917: Of food dictators, doping, and thousand-eyed girls

Pres. Wilson wins his battle with Congress over the composition of the food board. They wanted a a three-member board, he wanted a single food dictator, Herbert Hoover.

Black soldiers stationed in Waco, Texas clash with police, who shoot them, as was the custom.

Justice Dept agents are investigating an alleged widespread plot for “pro-German” doctors to dope men before their draft medical inspections.

On Broadway, mentalist Leona La Mar, the Girl with the Thousand Eyes, adds to her act a bit where she guesses the draft numbers of audience members.

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Today -100: July 30, 1917: Of legions and canning

Gen. Jozef Pilsudski, leader of the Polish Legions, which have been fighting against Russia under Austrian command, is arrested (along with other leaders of the Legions) because he ordered members to refuse to take an oath to the German kaiser (I believe they already had to take one to the Austrian emperor). Pilsudski, who was only ever in the fight against Russia to gain autonomy for Poland, had watched the lip service of the Central Powers to Polish autonomy grow weaker as Russia became weaker. He will be held prisoner until the end of the war, and then rise to power (and then to dictatorial power in the 1930s) in Poland.

Germany threatens to withhold coal from Switzerland unless it makes a huge loan to Germany.

A mass meeting of negroes, representing NYC negro churches, clubs, etc, calls for black representation in the Legislature and Board of Alderman, squads of negro police and firemen, and a negro-only bathhouse.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Much of the newspaper for the next few days is taken up by lists of New Yorkers called up for draft examination.

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Today -100: July 29, 1917: Your hands are full of blood

The race rioting in Chester, Pennsylvania resumes.

Kerensky: “It is a spectre of anarchy which needs to be obliterated.” He closes Russia’s borders. The Petrograd Executive Committee of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet calls for Lenin and Zinoviev to be put on trial for inciting revolt and receiving German money.

Meanwhile, former Czar Nicholas is reported to have broken his leg bicycling. I doubt it, but here’s a picture of Nicky on a bikky... no, that doesn’t work, does it?

8,000 negroes march on Fifth Avenue, NYC in protest against Jim Crow, disfranchisement of blacks, and the race wars of East St. Louis, Waco, Memphis, etc. The police complain about a banner picturing a negro woman kneeling before Wilson, appealing to him to bring democracy to the US before trying to do so in Europe, so they put it away, but other banners said “Make America Safe for Democracy,” “India is Abolishing Caste, America Is Adopting It,” “Your Hands Are Full of Blood” (yick), “Pray for the Lady Macbeths of St. Louis,” “We are Maligned as Lazy, and Murdered When We Work.”

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Today -100: July 28, 1917: Of governors, shrinks, and conscripting foreigners

Texas Gov. James Ferguson is indicted, along with other state officials, for misappropriation of public funds and embezzlement. Immediately after being arrested, he announces his re-election campaign.

Dr. Mortimer Raynor, a psychiatrist employed by the NY Department of Corrections at Welfare Island penitentiary, has joined the Army and will test soldiers for courage to determine which ones should be sent to the front and which ones really shouldn’t.

The Senate is working on a bill to conscript non-citizen immigrants from friendly countries.  But not those who can’t legally become US citizens, i.e. Chinese and Japanese, and not those from countries without conscription (Canada, Australia). This would all require the consent on those countries.

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Today -100: July 27, 1917: Of race riots, women spies, and horsies

3 killed, 2 white, 1 black, in a race riot in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Just a two-sentence story at this point.

Supposedly, Gen. Kornilov punishes an entire division for failing to fight – by executing all of them with artillery. I strongly doubt this is true.

New York’s last horse-drawn streetcar line shuts down. The NYT waxes nostalgic.

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Today -100: July 26, 1917: Of women’s battalions of death and crazy men in politics

The Russian government is loudly threatening to execute soldiers who refuse to fight.  Evidently Gen. Kornilov threatened to resign if capital punishment in the army wasn’t restored.

Russia’s Women’s Battalion of Death, practically the only soldiers who are willing to fight, goes into battle for the first time. Does pretty well.

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina, the first woman cabinet minister ever in any country, resigns as Assistant Minister of Social Tutelage (party politics, nothing personal).

The Russian government has ordered the arrest of Lenin, if they can find him, which they can’t. If convicted as a German spy, he’d be executed. If not, he’d be put under house arrest as a precaution against “a crazy man in politics at this crisis.”

Russia won’t accept the Finnish Landtag’s declaration of independence.

31 Wobblies are expelled from Bemidji, Minnesota by a mob which blames them for a sawmill fire.

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Today -100: July 25, 1917: Of merciless rule, the masses, war orphans, and conscription

Headline of the Day -100: 

Lenin’s newspaper Pravda is suppressed.

Federal District Judge Learned Hand grants a preliminary injunction against the NY postmaster banning The Masses from the US mails.

The French state will assume guardianship of all war orphans.

The Canadian House of Commons passes a bill for conscription. The vote divides along linguistic lines.

The puppet Polish Council of State gives up the idea of fielding an independent Polish army, presumably because almost no one signed up for it, and will put the few who did sign up under German command.

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Today -100: July 24, 1917: Mostly Russia stuff today

Headline of the Day -100:

Of the Leninite outbreak. As well he might be. Tsarist officials imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress were also worried when it was occupied briefly Bolsheviks and Kronstadt sailors.

The Pan-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets and the Pan-Russian Council of Delegates of Peasants vote unlimited dictatorial powers to Kerensky to deal with the outbreaks and the war (in that order). They also re-name the Cabinet the Government of National Safety, something like Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution, because that turned out so well. Lots of arrests of Bolsheviks and a rear admiral.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Granted, that’s according to correspondent Herbert Bailey, who also says Kerensky “possesses all Peter the Great’s energy and twice his wisdom, is the national hero.” He also notes that Russian peasants don’t like Jews.

Siam declares war on Germany and Austria.

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Today -100: July 23, 1917: Criminal levity?

Russian troops are retreating. Which is not what their commanding officers ordered them to do. Germany has broken through the front lines, facilitated, the Provisional Government says, “by the criminal levity and blind fanaticism of some and the treachery of the others.”

The provisional government also lists a whole raft of progressive measures it intends to implement, including equal suffrage, the 8-hour day, restoring the land to the peasants, etc, and therefore asks the people to support the country, “which has ceased to be for those inhabiting it a cruel stepmother.”

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Today -100: July 22, 1917: Of deportations, champagne, the masses, and the long tentacles of Germany

The Bisbee, Arizona sheriff has resumed deporting unemployed men who haven’t applied to the Vigilance Committee for “clearance” to work.

Headline of the Day -100:

Champagne and bomb-throwing, what could go wrong?

Federal District Court Judge Learned Hand rules that the postmaster-general can’t ban The Masses for merely criticizing the government. While the government’s position seems to be that anything that might interfere with the war is unmailable, Judge Hand says if the writing isn’t prosecutable as treason, it can’t be banned. The US attorney specifically complained about some cartoons (I posted one of them on July 10th).

Kerensky blames the Leninist riots in Petrograd on the Germans, because of course he does.

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Today -100: July 21, 1917: 258

The US selective service lottery has begun, with the ceremonial drawing of numbers from a big glass bowl. 10,500 numbers. It took 16½ hours. And one of them was blank, so they have to figure out which number wasn’t in the bowl (Update: 4,664). The first number, chosen by a blindfolded Secretary of War Newton Baker, was 258. The next number was drawn by Sen. Chamberlain, similarly blindfolded, then other officials, before the rest of the tedious work was done by blindfolded college students (fraternity hazing was pretty boring back then), interrupted every so often by Major Gen. Devel stirring the capsules containing the numbers with a long wooden spoon.

The new German chancellor, Georg Michaelis, described by the NYT as having a disproportionately large head, gives an introductory speech to the Reichstag. He follows the German line in blaming Britain for the war, because it didn’t dissuade Russia from mobilizing its army, which forced Germany to declare war purely in self-defense. That’s their story, and they’re sticking with it. Naturally, Michaelis fails to say what Germany’s war aims are, except “peace with honor” and secure borders (which is code for unspecified annexations). He supports the absolute right of the kaiser rather than the Reichstag to appoint officials.

After he’s done speaking, the Reichstag passes a peace resolution disavowing annexations of land and indemnities as contrary to a lasting peace.

Prince Lvov resigns as Russian prime minister and is replaced by Alexander Kerensky, who retains his post as minister of war. His ascension to power is celebrated, as was the custom, with an assassination attempt.

Australia bans the IWW.

Caesar Campus, president of the Sirio Match Company of Brooklyn, writes to the secretary of the navy with a cunning plan to defeat u-boats. Falcons! Carrying bombs! The details, which you can read in the article, don’t make the idea any more plausible, and in fact make me think this man shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches, much less own a match company.

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Today -100: July 20, 1917: These misguided extremists don’t mind a little sedition

Headline of the Day -100:

But just in case, the Cabinet is thinking about moving the government to Moscow.

Russia’s minister of justice, named Perverzev if you can believe it, resigns in an argument over whether Lenin is a German agent. The offices of Pravda are raided.

Woodrow Wilson orders the imprisoned suffragist White House picketers released from the workhouse. They’re initially hesitant about accepting the pardon, but it was unconditional, so it doesn’t interfere with their ability to protest in the future. Also, can you actually refuse a pardon? Don’t they just kick you out of prison?

The NYT is its usual dickish self (I use the term advisedly) on the subject: “These misguided extremists don’t mind a little sedition. They gayly defy the law, pose as martyrs. .... Then, the prison one-piece dress is really coarse and unbecoming. One meets such vulgar people in one’s quest of excitement and martyrdom, and corned beef and cabbage is no congenial cate to a dainty stomach.”

The Corfu Declaration is signed by representatives of the Serbian government and various southern Slav nationalities currently subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to create a new country, the Union of Southern Slavs (Yugoslavia).

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Today -100: July 19, 1917: Of pickets, martial law, tetanus, and war phonographs

Woodrow Wilson is upset by the jailing of the suffragists who protested outside the White House – probably a Southern male thing. He met with their lawyer, Dudley Field Malone, and has now met for 45 minutes with the husband of one of them, who says that Wilson may push for women’s suffrage as a wartime emergency measure. Meanwhile, in the Occoquan Workhouse, the suffragists are put in with black women, as degrading a thing as the authorities can think to do (the workhouse, you will be surprised to hear, is normally segregated).

The Russian government puts Petrograd under martial law to deal with outbreaks. Cossack patrols, men in trucks firing machine guns into the crowds on Nevsky Prospect, what could go wrong? The Bolsheviks disingenuously blame counter-revolutionaries for the demonstrations, but refuse to condemn them.

Three men, probably Germans, are arrested in Kansas for supposedly trying to spread tetanus through infected sticking plasters.

Never one to miss an opportunity to cash in, Thomas Edison introduces a new “war phonograph,” a sturdy iron model that can stand up to army life, designed to be listened to outdoors.

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