Today -100: August 12, 1917: The only way to win the war

The US will refuse to grant passports to the American delegates to the Stockholm socialist peace congress.

Russia will attempt to reimpose discipline on the army, replacing the commissars who were elected by the soldiers with appointed ones. The government is claiming that some of those elected commissars were the former czarist police (secret and otherwise) who were sent to the front and are now trying to undermine the war effort, using propaganda and vodka, as was the custom. Also blamed for the military collapse: German spies in Russian military uniforms, passing themselves off, with their perfect Russian, because Russian soldiers don’t have identity papers.

The Post Office revokes the second-class mailing privilege of the American Socialist.

Sinn Fein wins another Irish by-election, with William Cosgrave winning easily in Kilkenny.

Sen. Warren G. Harding says that to win the war the United States needs to have a “complete and supreme dictator” – his words – even if it’s that Democrat Wilson. He says the “system of legislation,” you know, Congress and all, is unsuited for wartime, because decisions need to be made instantly. But doesn’t that mean the complete abandonment of democracy? he is asked. “Call it what you will; it is the only way to win the war. However, it means that we abandon nothing except the incapacity of all legislative bodies in wartime.” Congress’s job would be “remain on the side lines, as it were, closely watching the great game, ready at any moment to rescind the powers it has delegated.” But wouldn’t that make us just like Germany? “Our advantage over the Germans is that we would put on autocracy as a garment only for the period of the war, whereas they wear autocracy as the flesh that clings to their bones.”

I know why this blog is giving space to a first-term senator, but I have no idea why the Sunday NYT devoted so much newsprint to Harding.

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Today -100: August 11, 1917: Kaiser Wilson

Suffrage picketers at the White House displease passers-by with a banner reading: “Kaiser Wilson – Have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor Germans because they are not self-governed? Twenty million American women are not self-governed. Take the beam out of your own eye.” The banner doesn’t last long.

Theodore Roosevelt wants Congress to ban all German-language newspapers for the duration.

Pres. Wilson orders one of the draft exemption boards in NYC disbanded because of alleged irregularities (they were exempting a lot of people, but that’s about it, so far). Everyone they exempted will have to be re-examined.

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Today -100: August 10, 1917: Of draft resisters and aspersion by innuendo

18 are arrested in Texas, supposed members of a plot for organized resistance to the draft.

Dr. Fritz Bergmeier, publisher of the St. Paul Volkszeitung, is arrested for “cast[ing] aspersion by innuendo” on US war measures. He’ll be interned as an enemy alien rather than tried.

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Today -100: August 9, 1917: Of controlled food, conscription, and fake assassins

The Senate finally passes the Food Control Bill.

Canada’s Senate passes a bill for conscription.

Now that Russia’s political prisoners have been released, returning Siberian exiles are being feted and showered with gifts, leading, inevitably, to people like Catherine Smirnov, who made out like a bandit assassin when she claimed in Minsk that she had assassinated Ivanov, the governor of Odessa. She is arrested when it turns out Odessa never had a governor named Ivanov, but it did have a con artist named Catherine Smirnov.

And here's Siegfried Sassoon on Passchendaele.

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Today -100: August 8, 1917: Of copper mines, national guards, and smoking soldiers

Jeanette Rankin makes her first speech in Congress, calling for it to give Wilson the power to take over copper mines to deal with the current strikes, which she blames more on the mining companies and their blacklists than on the IWW. She attacks John Ryan, the president of Anaconda, personally. If she has forgotten that Anaconda owns all the newspapers in Montana, she will be reminded of the fact when she runs for re-election.

Black groups protest a War Department ban on training negro national guard troops in the South.

Liberia declares war on Germany.

An important shipment of goods for American soldiers in France is “lost,”
which I assume means its ship was sunk. The Red Cross has accepted a donation of tobacco from Liggett & Myers to make up the shortage. Yes, the Red Cross handed out cigarettes to troops.

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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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