Today -100: November 25, 1917: Of secrets, dishonorable peaces, and diplomacy

Trotsky, putting on his Julian Assange wig, releases to the newspapers some of the secret correspondence of the Allies. Included are the discussions of Russia’s demand to be allowed to annex the Dardanelles and Constantinople. The Allies agreed that Russia would determine Germany’s new eastern borders and Britain and France its western ones.

French newspaper La Victoire accuses former PM and finance minister Joseph Caillaux of being behind the campaign for a dishonorable peace. Editor Gustave Hervé challenges Caillaux to sue him, and Caillaux does. A reminder that the last time a newspaper editor libeled Caillaux, his wife shot him dead (and got away with it).

The German government refuses to receive a Bolshevik delegation, saying it will only negotiate with reps of the defunct constitutional government. Also, their condition for talks is that Russian troops withdraw 100 km, while German troops don’t. Interestingly, the Bolshevik government seems to have made no peace offer to Austria.

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Today -100: November 24, 1917: We rely on the Germany army and the working classes to make a continuation of the war impossible

Supposedly, German agents are pretending to accidentally drop fake letters home from US soldiers in Europe on the floors of saloons, hotels, theaters etc, the letters saying how awful conditions are and that the army is censoring the high casualty rate. My favorite bit in the one letter quoted in the article is the PS: “Am in Chemin des Dames hospital left arm shot off to shoulder don’t tell mother tare off this part.”

Russia begins to reduce the size of its army.

And requires people living in residences renting for more than 2,400 rubles a year to provide the army with one blanket and one article of clothing.

Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky says his offer of an armistice (which has now been officially presented) is not a call for a separate peace with Germany. He says the offer will be welcomed by the proletariat of all warring nations, making continuation of the war impossible even if their governments reject it. “We rely on the Germany army and the working classes to make a continuation of the war impossible.”

In Red Lodge, Montana, the “Liberty Committee” horsewhip the secretary of the Finnish IWW Propaganda League and hang two members, but not to death, because liberty, I guess.

I believe I’ve spotted the first mention in the NYT of Nationalities Commissar Josef Stalin. They spell it Slatin, because of course they do.

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Today -100: November 23, 1917: It can commit acts of violence, treason, and cowardice, but it cannot govern

Nebraska Gov. Keith Neville resigns so he can be a colonel and go to war. (Except that didn’t happen. Did he change his mind?)

Lenin fires the head of the army, Gen. Nikolay Dukhonin, after Dukhonin refuses an order to offer an armistice to all belligerents on both sides.

The Russian ambassador to France, Vasily Maklakov, also rejects the idea, saying the Bolshevik regime “lacks both legal title and recognition by the country. It can commit acts of violence, treason, and cowardice, but it cannot govern.” (Insert your own Trump joke here)

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Today -100: November 22, 1917: Of broken lines, conshies, and leagues of nationses

The Hindenburg Line is broken! British tanks make a big difference.

The British House of Commons votes an amendment to the Representation of the People Act (which will enfranchise some women, among other things) disenfranchising conscientious objectors.

Prime Minister Clemenceau expresses doubt about the idea of a League of Nations, because it would have to include Germany and no.

Ban Johnson, president of the American League (baseball) plans to ask the government to exempt most baseball players from the draft.

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Today -100: November 21, 1917: Our State should not be taxed to educate useless or worthless children

Massachusetts Gov. Samuel McCall (R) refuses an extradition request from West Virginia for a black man accused of an assault on a white girl, because there’s a “grave danger” he’d be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.

Memphis Mayor H.H. Litty bans a proposed Woman’s Party meeting when he hears they intend to support the White House picketers.

Pres. Wilson blocks supply shipments to Russia, not knowing who’ll wind up getting their hands on them.

The New York State Woman Suffrage Party holds Victory Night at the Metropolitan Opera House during its 49th annual convention. The Party will respond to receiving women’s suffrage in New York by reorganizing itself along congressional-district lines and punishing every New York politician who opposed women’s suffrage in the past [update: no, this plank will be rejected] or who won’t commit themselves to the federal women’s suffrage amendment. Gov. Charles Whitman, who didn’t know about that, makes a speech recommending that women not vote for any politician just because he supported women’s suffrage or vote against one “merely” because he opposed it.

50+ Wobblies are arrested in the Kansas oilfields. On what charges, is not revealed.

NY District Superintendent of Schools Joseph Wade, supporting the witch hunt against teachers, says that in Germany, teachers who said anything disloyal were fired, jailed or even executed. He says this admiringly. “There must not remain in our schools a single discontented teachers. There is a spirit of restlessness that will grow up among our children unless those above them are absolutely loyal and continue teaching obedience to authority.” Any disloyal students 16 or over should be expelled; “Our State should not be taxed to educate useless or worthless children.” The teachers’ union is supporting the De Witt Clinton High School teachers, saying (if I read this correctly) that what is being done to them is what the ed. system does to students, “crushing out all manhood and womanhood in the process of making us spiritless automata”. And your point is?

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Today -100: November 20, 1917: Of masses, war dinners, teachers, and enemy aliens

A federal grand jury indicts 7 members of the staff of The Masses, including Max Eastman and John Reed,  under the Espionage Act for knowingly distributed unmailable material and for conspiring to cause “Insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of [military] duty”. Reed (who is in Russia) is charged for writing an article, “Knit a Straitjacket for Your Soldier Boy,” and Arthur Young and Henry Glinterkamp are indicted for drawings, Glinterkamp for a cartoon of Death taking the measurements of a draftee for his coffin.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Hey, that’s what we call it in my house too!

The specific charges against the De Witt Clinton High School (Bronx) teachers who were suspended or transferred are made public. Thomas Mufson evidently thought it was proper to be neutral during a discussion of anarchism, A. Henry Schneer said patriotism should not be discussed in school, and Samuel Schmalhausen has a funny name and also doesn’t think it’s his job to inculcate an instinctive respect for the president and other government officials and did I mention he has a funny name? At the hearing, a faculty member complained that (this quote is from the newspaper, not necessarily the verbatim words of Isaac A. Dotey, who also has a funny name) “the pupils had of late consulted their own individual opinion, and that this had been subversive of discipline.”

Pres. Wilson bans enemy aliens (Germans only for now; the US is not at war with Austria or Turkey) from the District of Columbia, the Panama Canal Zone, within 3 miles of navigable streams or 100 yards of docks, piers, canals, railroad terminals, etc. Enemy aliens must register and must get government permission to travel or change jobs. They are not allowed to fly in airplanes or balloons. Within a few hours, before the news could reasonably be expected to have been disseminated, soldiers are sent into River Street in Hoboken (which also has a funny name). They grab 200 suspected Germans out of stores, rooming houses, saloons, and just off the streets. Before being sent to Ellis Island, some are held on an army transport ship. Which then mysteriously bursts into flame.

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Today -100: November 19, 1917: Of temporary supreme commanders, farms, and free men

Russia: Gen. Nikolay Dukhonin proclaims himself temporary Supreme Commander of the military “in view of my ignorance of the place of residence of the Chief Commander [Kerensky]”. The job will indeed be temporary.

Sen. Warren G. Harding suggests that every returning soldier should be given a farm if he wants one. He thinks cities are bad and tiny farms, like in France, are good.

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau celebrates his new job by restoring the name of his newspaper to L’Homme Libre. He had changed it to L’Homme Enchainé when he fell afoul of the censors early in the war.

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Today -100: November 18, 1917: Of Rodins, pork, disloyal/doubtful teachers, courts-martial, apartments, and Polish primes

French sculptor Auguste Rodin dies at 77. Which reminds me I still haven’t gotten around to seeing the movie “Camille Claudel 1915.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

The NYT editorial page strongly supports firing all “disloyal or doubtful” teachers.

The first US Army court-martial execution of the war, a soldier who raped and murdered a woman in France. Evidently, Gen. Pershing can give the go-ahead to a firing squad without any reference to President Wilson.

Six high-rise, high-class apartment buildings (elevators, telephone service, etc) in Harlem have been taken over by a black real estate company and are now being rented to black people (the previous white tenants are all leaving). Blacks have been moving into Harlem for a few years, but this is their first successful entry into the upper end of the real estate market.

Prof. Jan Kucharzewski is appointed prime minister of Poland.

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Today -100: November 17, 1917: Of thrift, operas, shams, political prisoners, fake sailors, and axes

Headline of the Day -100: 

TOTALLY worth it. The government is literally demanding the money out of children’s piggy banks. The new war taxes on, say, movie tickets, mean that things that used to cost a dime or a quarter now cost a penny or two more, so the government wants those pennies out of the piggy banks and back in circulation so it doesn’t have to mint new ones.

A bomb fails to go off at the Chicago Grand Opera during a production of Meyerbeer’s Dinorah. There is a flash and a smell of sulphur, which starts a panic until the orchestra starts up the Star-Spangled Banner, which as we know has magical powers against pipe bombs. It is suspected, naturally, that this is retaliation for the company’s ban on German opera.

At Princeton, Theodore Roosevelt says unless we break up Austria and Turkey and free their subject races, all the talk of making the world safe for democracy is a “sham.” He’s still bitching that the US didn’t declare war immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania.

The women suffragist prisoners are refusing to wear prison clothes and trying to make demands, and are being roughly handled, manacled to prison bars, put in cells with detoxing men, and any other humiliation the guards can imagine.

Kerensky seems to have fled again. Dressed as a sailor. After his little band of Cossacks made a deal with the Bolsheviks to turn him over.

The British ambassador to Russia refuses to see Foreign Minister Trotsky.

The German Independent Socialists ask for an immediate session of the Reichstag to consider Lenin’s peace offer.

Three Austrian nationals in Virginia, Minnesota are killed with an axe for buying Liberty Loans and giving money to the American Red Cross (we know this because the killer left a note).

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Today -100: November 16, 1917: Of tigers

French President Poincaré asks Georges Clemenceau to form a new government. “The Tiger” is 76 years old. A doctor, journalist, former political exile in the US during the Second Empire, Clemenceau has moved over the years from fierce radicalism to fierce not-radicalism, and has been highly critical of the government’s insufficiently ferocious prosecution of the war, to the extent that his newspapers were suspended several times early in the war.

There are now 32 suffragist hunger strikers in the Occoquan Workhouse.

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Today -100: November 15, 1917: Of underwear. And other stuff.

The outside world has no idea what is going on in Russia, but boy are there a lot of contradictory rumors.

As Central forces move into Italy, Venice is evacuated. Including all the art, such as the symbol of Venice, the bronze horses of San Marco.

A warrant is issued for Robert Pettigrew, the former US senator from South Dakota and congresscritter from the Dakota Territory, for violating the Espionage Act by giving a newspaper interview in which he said the war was a capitalist scheme and suggesting men evade the draft. The government will eventually drop the charges, perhaps after hearing he’d hired Clarence Darrow.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Soldiers, who are being issued undershirts and underpants and may not want to go back to the traditional one-piece “union suit” with the little flap on the butt.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim dies. The NYT doesn’t notice.

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Today -100: November 14, 1917: The bourgeoisie has endeavored to separate the army from the revolution

China rejects the recent US-Japan agreement recognizing Japan’s “special interests” in China and the “open door” for US trade in China. China says agreements between other nations are not binding on it.

Paul Painlevé resigns as French prime minister after 9 weeks, after losing a confidence motion. There is some push-back against the new inter-allied war council.

There are contradictory reports about the clashes between Bolshevik-controlled military forces and Kerensky’s. Trotsky is declaring victory, as was the custom: “The bourgeoisie has endeavored to separate the army from the revolution. Kerensky has attempted to break it by the violence of Cossackdom. Both efforts have failed. ... The opposition to Kerensky is the opposition to the landlords, the bourgeois, and Kornilov. The opposition to Kerensky is also the affirmation of the people’s right to peace, free life, the land, bread and power.”

Speaking of bread and power, Food Administrator Herbert Hoover bans the destruction of stale bread.

The newly enfranchised women of New York are now demanding the right to sit on juries. They’ll get it at, er, some point, but it won’t be mandatory as it is for men until the mid-1970s.

NYC Associate Superintendent of Schools John Tildlsey, after holding his own little inquisition for De Witt Clinton High School (Bronx) teachers, has suspended 3 and transferred 8 for “holding views which are subversive of discipline in the schools and which undermine good citizenship,” i.e., not being completely gung ho about the war. One of the teachers who was cross-examined (the article doesn’t say if he’s one of the ones disciplined) says that one question he was asked was “Don’t you believe that Jewish students, especially the Russians, need to be disciplined out of their individualistic tendencies?” They were also asked their views of the Bolsheviks, whether teachers should inculcate instinctive obedience to superiors like they do in Germany, etc.

Feds and local police raid an IWW meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, and arrest 50 delegates.

Woodrow Wilsons personal secretary Joseph Tumulty denies persistent rumors that he has been arrested and imprisoned as a spy.

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Today -100: November 13, 1917: We are making all our statements now by means of cannon

In a speech in Paris, British Prime Minister Lloyd George says of the recent creation of an inter-allied council staff to oversee more central coordination of the militaries of Britain, France, and Italy, that the Italian disaster necessitated acting quickly without bringing in Russia (!) and the US, which will hopefully join soon. “Disaster,” by the way, is the word he uses to describe Italy’s military near-collapse. He also says the council is necessary because of past “blunders.” Actually, “incredible blunders.”

The military forces of Kerensky and the Bolsheviks clash.

Trotsky replies to an AP interview request: “we are making all our statements now by means of cannon. I have nothing to say otherwise.”

Judge Mallowney of D.C. police court suspends the sentences of the 41 suffragist White House picketers. So with this unexpected free time (so to speak), they go back and picket the White House again, although Woodrow Wilson is actually....

...in Buffalo, speaking at the American Federation of Labor annual convention, where he attacks pacifists: “I want peace, but I know how to get it, and they do not.”

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Today -100: November 12, 1917: Of speedy wars, collapsing revolutions, wholesome truths, queens, explosives, salutes, and political prisoners

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Bolshevik revolution is “approaching collapse,” reports the NYT. Troops loyal to Kerensky are approaching Petrograd.

Supposedly, new self-appointed Russian foreign minister Leon Trotsky shows up at the Foreign Office and is met with obstruction – not being shown the secret treaties, being told there was no French interpreter available for him to send a telegram, etc – and “the typewriter girls of the Ministry assailed him with some wholesome truths about his origin, his aims, and his activities generally.” Assuming this has any basis in reality, “his origin” almost certainly means his Jewishness.

Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last monarch, deposed by a US-backed coup in 1893, dies.

The Bureau of Mines plans to thwart bomb plots by arresting anyone in possession of explosives without a license.

There is some debate over whether white soldiers in the US Army can refuse to salute black officers.

The 41 suffragists currently out on bail, and 50 of their closest friends, force  their way into the yard of the prison where Alice Paul and Rose Winslow are being forcibly fed, and are able to talk with Paul and get some instruction about how to deal with prison when they’re sentenced. Demand political prisoner status immediately, she says. She complains that they’re force-feeding her 3 times a day where the British prison authorities only did it twice a day.

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Today -100: November 11, 1917: The Maximalists are in no way representative of the whole of Russia

41 suffragist picketers are arrested in front of the White House.

Kerensky resurfaces, in the town of Luga, 85 miles from the capital.

A temporary cabinet is named, with Lenin as prime minister and Trotsky foreign minister.

The Russian Embassy in Washington refuses to recognize the Bolshevik regime. Ambassador Boris Bakhmeteff, who will continue to pretend to be Russia’s ambassador until 1922 and will never see Russia again, says “The Petrograd events are a revolt of a party against a national government. The Maximalists are in no way representative of the whole of Russia.”

A mob of “Knights of Liberty” in Tulsa seize 17 IWW members from the police and flog and tar & feather them. The cops were already going to “persuade” them to leave town, as was the custom.

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Today -100: November 10, 1917: We offer a just peace, but we cannot accept unjust terms

Political parties in New York respond to the passage of women’s suffrage by hurriedly recruiting women. Tammany Hall is trying to figure out which ones to bribe with jobs, as was the custom. And the state will have to double the number of election districts.

The State Department thinks the Bolshevik Revolution can’t possibly last. The great hope among the Allies is that “some strong man” – not a Bolshevik – will emerge to take control of Russia.

Lenin says he will propose a 3-month armistice, during which time elected representatives of each country – not diplomats – can work out a peace. “We offer a just peace, but we cannot accept unjust terms.”

The arrest of all members of the Kerensky government is ordered on the grounds of complicity with Gen. Kornilov’s revolt, which is ridiculous.

The prison doctor where the suffragette White House picketers are being held says they weren’t force-fed, they “merely want to advertise themselves by saying they have been fed forcibly.” He is lying.

Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration wants cranberries dropped from Thanksgiving dinner, as they require too much sugar.

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Today -100: November 9, 1917: Now we have a revolution

The Bolsheviks seize the Winter Palace. It’s all pretty bloodless so far. The Petrograd Soviet promises an immediate “democratic peace” and the redistribution of land. The military death penalty is re-abolished. “Now we have a revolution,” Lenin says, “The peasants and workers control the government. This is only a preliminary step toward a similar revolution everywhere.” But does this mean anything outside Petrograd? Will the rest of the country and the military follow? Will Kerensky (currently nowhere to be found) establish a competing government in Moscow?

Headline of the Day -100: 

This is the Balfour Declaration. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour writes to Lord Walter Rothschild to pass on to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland that the UK now supports “a national home for the Jewish people” “in Palestine.” Which is all quite vague, and intentionally so. A home doesn’t necessarily mean a state, and “in Palestine” doesn’t necessarily mean all of Palestine. Balfour says this shouldn’t “prejudice the civil or religious rights” of non-Jews in Palestine.

Hunger-striking suffragist prisoners Alice Paul and Rose Winslow are forcibly fed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a black soldier from the Ohio National Guard brushes against a white woman on a crowded street car. For this infraction, he is kidnapped by a bunch of white men and taken away in a car towards an unknown fate. More soldiers from his battalion (so also black) rush off in pursuit in carjacked automobiles, and....  the NYT never runs a follow-up, so who knows.

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Today -100: November 8, 1917: What’s the Russian for “It’s on, bitches”?

Headlines of the Day, on opposite columns of the front page:

I just found the juxtaposition funny, for some reason.

So yeah, the October/November Revolution has begun. Kerensky outlaws the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet and deploys guards he thinks he can trust from the officers’ training schools and Cossacks and the Women’s Battalion of Death. The Preliminary Parliament votes, 123-102, to work with the government but rejects a resolution for the suppression of the Bolsheviks.

Alice Hill Chittenden, president of the NY State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, is not at all bitter about losing the referendum: “when radicalism and socialism prevail, woman suffrage will carry.” She also blames pacifism and says New York men will “rue the day.” Rue the day, I tell you!

Another classical music performance canceled. I hadn’t realized this was going to be such a thing. This time it’s two Pittsburgh performances by violinist/composer Fritz Kreisler (you can hear him on YouTube). Kreisler used to be a lieutenant in the Austrian Army, invalided out in 1914, so there’s public outrage by people who haven’t noticed that the US is not at war with Austria.

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Today -100: November 7, 1917: There is no Hohenzollern here

Ohio: a prohibition referendum narrowly loses, for the 3rd time, and women’s suffrage loses 57-43.

Prohibition very narrowly loses in Iowa but wins 3 to 1 in New Mexico. There are now 27 dry states.

Women’s suffrage loses in Maine 65-35, but wins in New York (54-46). The NYT blames the reversal from 1915 on low turnout as people are too concerned with the war to make the world safe for democracy to bother voting. Or something.

NYC Boy Mayor John Purroy Mitchel is defeated, winning 23% of the vote, not much more than the Socialist Morris Hillquit (22%), while Judge John Hylan gets 46%. Hylan’s plurality is the largest in New York history. Tammany Hall sweeps the municipal elections, and Al Smith (future presidential candidate) is the new president of the Board of Aldermen. The city also elects 7 socialists to the state Assembly.

A sampling of editorials is entitled “Papers in Other Cities Do Not Like New York Election Result.” The Washington Post, for example, says the high socialist vote “confirms fears of a bad situation in which soapbox orators hold an unfortunate power in molding the views of the unthinking Americans.”

Gov. Charles Whitman says that, contrary to everything Mitchel said before the election, Germany should not be encouraged by the Hylan victory. “The people of New York State are patriotic. There is no Hohenzollern here.”

Suffragette Alice Paul goes on hunger strike in the District prison, demanding better food for the suffragist picketer/prisoners. They’ve been getting salt pork and cabbage. (In fact, the issue is that the suffragists are not being allowed to buy outside food like other prisoners).

Leon Trotsky, president of  the Petrograd Soldiers’ and Workers’ Soviet, asks the Petrograd Garrison to ignore orders from the government unless approved by the Soviet’s Revolutionary Military Committee.

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Today -100: November 6, 1917: Of special interests, symphonies, operators, acute perils, and masses

Secretary of State Robert Lansing signs an agreement recognizing Japan’s “special interests” in China, while Japan recognizes the “open door” for US trade in China.

Baltimore bars the Boston Symphony from playing because of the danger of disorder from idiots, including former governor Edwin Warfield.

New York Telephone has an ad in the Times asking customers not to dial the operator to ask for election results. They’ve provided this service in the past but there’s a war on, you know.

Hungary is refusing to send grain to Austria. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is not going well.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Radical... pacifists. Trotsky predicted the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet would come into power Sunday (which was 2 days ago).

Newsdealers are refusing to handle periodicals that the Post Office has barred from the mails, fearing prosecution. It is only illegal to sell the particular issues which the PO deems un-mailable, but dealers are barring every issue of any magazine, such as The Masses, that has been censored. They are probably right to be cautious, because they can be prosecuted for carrying something which is later declared seditious.

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