Today -100: November 5, 1917: Of POWs and chain letters

NYC mayoral candidate John Hylan claims that the Mitchel campaign tried to pressure a government employee, a photographer, into saying that he’d seen Hylan at the Friends of Peace convention in 1915, but that man denies the story. It’s all very fishy.

The first US prisoners of war are captured during the first clash between US and German soldiers.

The government claims to have discovered a German plot to clog the US mails through the use of chain letters, aka the “peace prayer” chain.

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Today -100: November 4, 1917: Of over-the-top New Yorkers, zones, and savings

NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel says he will definitely be re-elected because “the real Americans of this city will go over the top against the forces of disloyalty.”

“Over the top,” by the way, is a very new phrase, referring to going over the top of the trenches at the start of a battle.

Question of the Day:

“In the Zone,” one of his sailor one-acts, opens, his first professional production.

A Lithuanian carpenter is arrested carrying a bomb onto a Navy troop transport ship in a NY shipyard.

A. Mitchell Palmer, the future attorney general and dickwad who currently rejoices in the title Alien Property Custodian, says that while the government will be seizing German companies’ property in the US, individuals’ postal savings accounts won’t be touched.

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Today -100: November 3, 1917: Of fires, muck, masses, quitters, and women’s reasons

There is evidently a German “uprising” in southern Brazil. Which seems to just mean a railway strike.

The US government says that since the US entered the war, fires have destroyed $25 million worth of food, most of those fires started by German spies or sympathizers, because German spies are responsible for everything bad that happens now.

Theodore Roosevelt demands that Boston Symphony conductor Karl Muck be deported for refusing to play the Star-Spangled Banner. Muck offers his resignation, which has not yet been accepted, and plays the tune.

A Circuit Court upholds the banning of The Masses from the mails, which evidently means that just producing the magazine is now illegal, through logic that seems ridiculously faulty. The court also says that the crime of obstructing enlistment in the military does not require that the magazine directly advise people not to enlist, but that it prints absolutely anything that could be interpreted by those inclined to so interpret it as impeding, hindering, restraining or putting an obstacle in the way of recruitment, including the “natural and reasonable effect of the publication”.

The Washington Post publishes some of that AP interview with Kerensky mentioned here yesterday under the title “Russia Quits War; Blames English for Not Sending Fleet.” The Russian embassy is now scrambling to reassure everyone that Russia is not in fact quitting the war.

The Russian government has decided not to abandon Petrograd after all (Germany has stopped what had looked like an all-out attempt to capture the capital in favor of a push to knock Italy out of the war).


Two ads, NYT, page 11:

The NYT is also opposed to the women’s suffrage amendment.

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Today -100: November 2, 1917: Yellow calls to yellow

The Bolsheviks do badly in Russian municipal elections, 7% in the big cities, less in small towns. And they abandon plans for a demonstration in Petrograd. So the government is pretty sure the Bolshies are on the decline.

Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky tells the Associated Press that Russia is “worn out” and everyone else should just carry on with the war while Russia has a bit of a lie-down. He also complains that the German navy is in the Baltic and where the hell is the British navy?

NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel releases a poster of the letterhead of the Friends of Peace listing John Hylan as an honorary vice president. Hylan calls it a forgery, and again states that a lot of people were once listed as hon veeps without their permission, including several in the Mitchel campaign and administration, and anyway that was before the US entered the war, as was the endorsement of Hylan by the Hearst-owned German-language Deutsches Journal in 1915 that Mitchel is now citing as proof of treason or something. Mitchel says the result of this election will be seen in Germany, and if German soldiers read that “the Kaiser wins in New York,” they will be encouraged and strengthened, and “the American in the trench a hundred yards away may pay with his life as the penalty for disloyalty at home. The time has come to choose between the seditious and the loyal, between enemies and friends, between traitors and Americans.”

Theodore Roosevelt on Socialist mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit: “Yellow calls to yellow, and that is all there is in that campaign.”

By the way, look who else is running, for the #2 position in city government.

In Britain, the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union changes its name to the Woman’s Party with a platform of a little bit of feminism and a lot of screw-Germany-into-the-ground-forever.

The Metropolitan Opera decides to leave Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde out of the new season. In London German operas have been performed only in English translation since the start of the war. Tomorrow the Met will announce the exclusion of all German-language opera. It was the Met that originally brought Parsifal to the US and which gave the first performance of the complete Ring Cycle in the Western Hemisphere. German operas still under copyright, like Strauss’s Rosenkavelier, would actually be illegal to perform under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

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Today -100: November 1, 1917: Of perjury, rallies, and unserious music

NYC mayoral race: John Hylan denies Mayor John Mitchel’s charge that he is a member of the Society of Friends of Peace. So Mitchel now demands he repeat that under oath subject to perjury. And, er, how would he even do that?

Socialist New York mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit holds a rally filling Madison Square Garden. The government sends stenographers as a subtle warning to watch what he says.

Henry Higginson, the founder and chief patron of the Boston Symphony, threatens to shut it down if there continues to be pressure from the public and the government  to play the Star-Spangled Banner, which he considers inappropriate for a program of serious symphonic music. The clamor, which was stirred up by the Providence Journal, will continue until the symphony’s conductor, Dr. Karl Muck, a German-born Swiss citizen, is interned in March.

A new issue of the Wipers Times is out.

From the diary of Lieut. Samuel Pepys: “On the Thursday of last week we did take up our residence in a new part of the trench. Tis a noisome place, and I am disgusted of it. The mud is of a terrifying stickiness, and I am feared for my breeches, which cost me one guinea at the Hope Brothers’ establishment in Cheapside. Also I have spoiled my new coat on the barbed wire, which has grieved me, as it was of a good shape and fitting. ... As I must take a party out for the sandbagging, to bed at 7 of the clock, after a poor dinner, the Macconnochie being but of medium quality and not too hot.”

And a poem:

Sentry! What of the night?
The sentry’s answer I will not repeat.
Though short in words, ‘twas with feeling replete,
It covered all he thought and more,
It covered all he’d thought before,
It covered all he might think yet
In years to come. For he was wet
And had no rum.

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Today -100: October 31, 1917: Of cults of dishonesty, pure camouflage, and Schutzengrabenvernichtaungautomobile

The first American to be wounded in the trenches is a lieutenant in the Signal Corps, which is all the Army is saying about him.

Kaiser Wilhelm names Georg von Hertling, the Bavarian prime minister as the new German chancellor. Although a member of the (Catholic) Zentrum party, he’s more hard right than, um, zentrist, especially on the war, annexations and so forth. He is 74 and won’t have much authority as government functions are increasingly coming under the control of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

Continuing his high-minded campaign for re-election, New York City Boy Mayor John Purroy Mitchel accuses Judge John Hylan of aiding and abetting pro-German propaganda, of associating with paid agents of Germany and with men denounced by the government as disloyal. He calls Hylan’s campaign a “German attack from within” by which “the Hohenzollern has determined to seize, control, and corrupt the government of New York City,” and calls on voters to prove “that New York is still an American city.” I especially enjoy his continual attempts to portray Hylan as evading his questions, questions which tend to be unanswerable: “Judge Hylan has refused to explain what action of his has attracted to his support the disloyal and seditious elements in this city.” Oh, and Mitchel says Hylan and Hearst are in a “cult of disloyalty.”

Hylan, who the NYT always refers to as the Tammany candidate (there’s an editorial entitled “The Hylan Plot Exposed”), calls the accusations of un-Americanism from Mitchel, Roosevelt etc a “fake issue” to distract from Mitchel’s siding with big business and special privilege.

Socialist candidate Morris Hillquit agrees that the issue of patriotism in this campaign is “pure camouflage.” And he responds to Roosevelt’s calling him an agent of Prussianized autocracy by calling Roosevelt “the most demoralizing influence in the political life of our country”. He says TR supports the war not to spread democracy but as a business proposition for the profit of the rich commercial classes.

There’s also a Republican candidate somewhere, but he doesn’t and won’t amount to much (Mitchel was elected as an R in 1913 but lost the primary this year and is now that annoying New York oddity, a “Fusion” candidate). He claims the newspapers are conspiring to kill his candidacy by not reporting on it. That, the NYT reports, probably just to be sarcastic.

German soprano Frieda Hempel is refused a license for a concert in Providence, Rhode Island until she promises to sing The Star-Spangled Banner.

The Germans have a word for tanks: Schutzengrabenvernichtaungautomobile. It won’t be in use for long (assuming anyone really uses it now: “Franz, look out, there’s a Schutzengrabenvernichtaungautomobile coming...!”) When Germany starts producing its own tanks next year they’ll be called Sturmpanzerwagen. Whether that gets shortened to panzer during or after this war I do not know. Anyone?

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Today -100: October 30, 1917: An experience of this kind shakes one's faith in the doctrine of non-resistance

The US Army takes its first German prisoner of war, who dies of his wounds, but only after supposedly telling his captors that German soldiers are all tired of the war, and only the officers want to continue.

The US government is discussing how to come to the aid of Italy and prevent it collapsing under the Teutonic onslaught, but anything it does will likely involve fighting Austrian troops and the US hasn’t declared war on Austria yet, so it may have to do that.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Before commencing, they read out “In the name of the poor women and children of Belgium this man should be whipped.” “This man” is Herbert Bigelow, head of the People’s Church of Cincinnati, who is told not to return to the city, but afterwards, when he’s in the hospital recovering, somebody claiming to be one of the whipping party calls to say he can return, if he behaves himself. Bigelow says “An experience of this kind shakes one's faith in the doctrine of non-resistance. It has converted me, at least temporarily, to the gospel of preparedness.” Bigelow will be elected to Congress from Ohio in 1936.

Theodore Roosevelt speaks in support of NYC Boy Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s re-election, saying a man who votes for anyone else “will have the poor satisfaction of feeling that he has voted in a way that will give comfort to the Prussianized Germany that we are fighting at this moment.” Also, “We are to decide whether we have got a country, or whether we have simply got a polyglot boarding house!” He accuses Socialist candidate Morris Hillquit of the crime of not having bought a Liberty Loan bond.

Broadway theatres and stores beg the Fuel Administrator to allow them to continue running their signs at night. The electricity they’re using is just surplus, they say.

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Today -100: October 29, 1917: Of peace mandates, caporetti, and fraternization

Socialist candidate for NYC mayor Morris Hillquit says his victory would be a mandate for peace.

German and Austrian troops push into northern Italy (the Battle of Caporetto). Some units of the Italian army surrender without a fight, as was the custom. The official report calls them cowards, although the Germans were using poison gas and Italian soldiers were given woefully inadequate gas masks. On the German side, a Lt. Erwin Rommel did especially well.

Vittorio Orlando will form a new Italian government.

Russian artillery is turned on Russian soldiers fraternizing with the German enemy.

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Today -100: October 28, 1917: This is the time to support Woman Suffrage

The Austrian Socialist Party convention demands that the government proclaim the principle of no annexations and no indemnities, giving up its pretensions to control Serbia and Poland.

US troops finally arrive in the trenches in France, sneaking in at night. And the first US artillery shell of the war has been fired, by a red-headed gunner, the NYT informs us.

20,000 women march down New York’s 5th Avenue in support of women’s suffrage. They’re really pushing the theme of women’s war contributions as a reason for suffrage. One banner  says “Our sons are fighting for democracy. In the name of democracy give us the vote.” Others (see below) quote Woodrow Wilson’s support. Other banners reject the National Woman’s Party’s picketing of the White House. There are several black women (which has been an issue of contention in suffrage parades before, though not I think this time).

That’s Carrie Chapman Catt center front.

Note the large poster for Liberty Bonds on the bank at the left.

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Today -100: October 27, 1917: Congaing off to war. Yeah I went there.

Brazil declares war on Germany.

Speaker of the House Champ Clark retracts his accusation that New York bankers (he can’t remember if he accused “a ring of New York financiers” or “a ring of New York men,” but of course he meant “a ring of Jews”) were sabotaging the Liberty Loan.

The US will allow pianist Ignace Paderewski



to raise a Polish Legion to fight in the war, although it’s unclear under whose authority they’d fight. Pretty sure it never happened. Paderewski will be prime minister of Poland in 1919.

The NYT – quel surprise! – opposes next month’s women’s suffrage referendum: “is not the anti-suffrage majority better entitled to be saved from the ballot than the suffrage minority to get the ballot?” But the Times is pretty sure “there is a sort of popular impatience with woman suffrage at this time.”

There will be a suffragist parade on 5th Avenue Saturday. The anti association warns shops along the route not to decorate for the parade.

The Indiana Supreme Court invalidates the law giving women the municipal vote. It rules that since the state constitution defines voters as male, the Legislature didn’t have the authority to give votes to women. Carrie Chapman Catt points out that it’s almost impossible to amend the Indiana constitution, so the only path forward is at the federal level.

The Italian government loses a vote of confidence and resigns.

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Today -100: October 26, 1917: Of New York traitors, war hogs, turnips, and yellow perils

Speaker of the House “Champ” Clark claims that “a ring of New York financiers” is sabotaging the Liberty Loan so the next one will have to pay higher interest. He doesn’t name names or reveal his source. The NYT demands the federal DA make him appear and offer proof.

Despite the alleged sabotage, the Loan has raised close to $5 billion.

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech on women’s suffrage that offers stronger support than he has previously.

Everett Wheeler, the chairman of the Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women, writes to Wilson to complain that prominent suffragists Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt are campaigning for the women’s suffrage referendum in New York, despite being on the Women’s Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense. He wants an executive order banning women people in public service from engaging in politics.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Headline of the Day -100: 

Or vice versa. Also, the government decrees that women’s skirts must be shorter and tighter to... to conserve material, yeah, that’s the ticket.

Headline of the Day -100: 

In other words, they’re trying to fuck soldiers. This will become a grave concern for some people, including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

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Today -100: October 25, 1917: Only by German bayonets

Kerensky complains to the Preliminary Parliament that the army “seems to have lost the sense of duty and honor”. He blames the Bolsheviks for undermining morale. Minister of War Verkhovski plans to introduce legislation allowing for collective punishment of entire regiments, reducing the food rations of demoralized units because that’ll help. “It seems to be possible to end anarchy only by German bayonets,” he says.

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Today -100: October 24, 1917: A thing no government can permit is organisation for rebellion

The US Secret Service claims to have thwarted a German plot to start another rising in Ireland next Easter. Which the SS nipped in the bud by arresting... three men. Which doesn’t really sound like a large rising, as risings go. One of the men is “General” Liam Mellowes, who led a division during the Easter Rising and then escaped to the US. He will be executed in 1922 during the Irish Civil War.

In Parliament, Lloyd George says “a thing no government can permit is organisation for rebellion.” John Redmond of the Irish Nationalists says the Irish Executive is trying to undermine the Irish convention (which is currently meeting to work out Ireland’s future) through petty harassments like banning Swedish gymnastic exercises and arresting Boy Scouts for drilling.

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Today -100: October 23, 1917: We must settle this once for all

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George says that any peace enacted now would just be an armed truce preparatory to an even bigger war: “all the best scientific brains in the lands, stimulated by national rivalry, national hatred, national hopes, devoting their energies for ten, twenty, thirty years to magnifying destructive powers. We must settle this once for all.” He notes that air power and submarines – “the infernal weapons of the deep” – are in their infancy. After 30 years of development, their use “would mean the death of civilisation.”

There will be a women’s suffrage parade Saturday in New York City to support next month’s referendum. Since one of the banners will evidently scold the suffragists who’ve been picketing the White House, the National Woman’s Party (whose chair Alice Paul has been sentenced along with Dr. Caroline Spencer to 7 months for their picketing) will skip the parade and hold a protest meeting outside the New York Woman’s Suffrage Party hq instead.

NY Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, speaking to a bunch of Methodist Episcopal ministers, denies the Hearst papers’ claims that he dances the tango. This “greatly pleased the ministers”.

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Today -100: October 22, 1917: The revolution and the people are in danger

Theodore Roosevelt admits that he is blind in one eye, the result of a boxing mishap when he was, um, president of the United States.

At the opening of the Preliminary Parliament in Petrograd, PM Kerensky praises the navy but says the army sucks. President of the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Leon Trotsky addresses the body, attacking the government as bourgeois and retrograde. Before leading a walk-out, he says “I am leaving to tell the workers, soldiers and peasants that the revolution and the people are in danger.”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow comes out, the second Sherlock Holmes book published during the war, consisting of stories published before the war except for the title story, with the bees and the spies.

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Today -100: October 21, 1917: Of disrespect for law and order, and what 8¢ can buy you

NYC mayoral candidate John Hylan blames the student strikes and school-window-breakings on Mayor Mitchel for imposing the Gary system against the wishes of parents, although he finds the turmoil “deplorable” and “bound to develop in our children a disrespect for law and order”.

You’re In The Army Now:

And I’m sure it’s scrumptious.

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Today -100: October 20, 1917: Of untruths, moving to Moscow, and Chequers

Headline of the Day -100: 

In a lawsuit in 1908 against the Black Diamond Automobile Company of Brooklyn. Mayor Mitchel says Hylan used a dummy to sue the company while he was its lawyer.

The NYT claims that Bulgaria is trying to negotiate separately from its Teutonic allies, whom it worries will screw it at the peace conference. It’s certainly been left out of talks with Russia over prisoner exchanges.

The Russian government announces that it will move to Moscow. German troops are getting closer and closer to Petrograd, with zeppelins and everything.

Lloyd George takes possession of Chequers, the country mansion donated for the use of British prime ministers by Sir Arthur Lee. Because the idea was to give it to the office of prime minister rather than to Lloyd George personally, a law had to be enacted, which marks the first reference in British law to the office of prime minister.

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Today -100: October 19, 1917: Of mutinies, loan slackers, conspiracies, and funny-looking dogs – yeah, I said it, funny-looking

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: More alleged mutinies are reported in the German and Austrian navies.

The NYT is calling people who don’t buy enough war bonds (the Liberty Loan) “loan slackers.”

Mexican Gen. Obregon says Pancho Villa and his soldiers are completely surrounded. In other news, Mexico is still a thing, not that you’d know it from the Times (this story exists only because Obregon is in New York).

Protests against the Gary system continue in the Bronx, with parents now joining students in breaking school windows and throwing stones at cops, as was the custom.

11 socialists are acquitted in Grand Rapids for conspiracy against conscription, which amounts to just circulating literature supposedly inducing men not to register. The judge tells the jury that socialism is not on trial; the judge is full of shit.

A judge recognizes a man charged with manslaughter as one he himself prosecuted for murder 25 years before, so that was a nice reunion. This time the man, now a saloon owner, killed his bartender because “He made fun of my dog.”

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Today -100: October 18, 1917: The German agent pervades the land

A NYT editorial warns, “The German agent pervades the land.” With German-language papers now under strict censorship/ban by the Post Office, these agents’ principle weapon is spreading rumors about sunk transport ships, mutinies, etc.

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Today -100: October 17, 1917: Of Gary systems, Polands, candy, and picketers

NYC Mayor Mitchel’s introduction of the “Gary system” of education – rotating students to different rooms throughout the day for efficiency, increased vocational ed., etc – is meeting a little resistance, with 1,000 kids on the Upper East Side going on strike and smashing school windows. There is concern that the Gary system (as in Gary, Indiana) is too focused on shaping working-class children for the needs of capitalism, and there’s a religious thing, and a certain amount of hysteria.

Russia now says the peace agreement must include complete independence for Poland, not just autonomy under Russia.

Meanwhile, Germany finally installs its puppet Council of Regency in Poland, appointing the archbishop of Warsaw, the mayor of Warsaw (a prince), and some rich dude.

Headline of the Day -100: 

British Prime Minister Lloyd George withdraws his libel action against several newspapers which said that he left London after an air raid warning was given, after the papers retract.

4 of the suffragists who picketed the White House are sentenced to 6 months in the workhouse.

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