Today -100: December 10, 1917: Of civil wars, armistices, and swear words

The Bolshevik government announces that Gens. Kornilov and Alexey Kaledin of the Don Cossacks have started a revolt in the Don region “against the people and the revolution.” The counter-revolution and civil war begin here.

The Russian and German positions in the armistice negotiations seem quite far apart.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: December 9, 1917: Of coups, enemy aliens, and armistices

A revolution in Portugal (actually more like a coup) led by Sidónio Pais forces the government to resign. Pais will exercise increasingly dictatorial powers for a year until he is assassinated.

One consequence of the US declaring war on Austria: newly enemied aliens from the Empire have to be weeded out of the US military.

Trotsky informs the Allies that Russia will only sign an armistice with Germany on condition that it not move troops to the western front (a condition Germany has been scoffing at). On the 7th, for the first time since the war began, not a shot is fired on the Russian front. Trotsky is suspending negotiations a week to give the Allies time to say whether they will join an armistice and, if not, to state what their war aims are.

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Today -100: December 8, 1917: In matters of war I am a teetotaler

The US is at war with Austria. The declaration passes the Senate unanimously (La Follette is not present, claiming later he didn’t know the vote was going on) and the House by 363 to 1, the 1 being Meyer London (Socialist-NY), who says Socialists oppose war. “In matters of war I am a teetotaler. I refuse to take the first intoxicating drink.” Walter Chandler (R-NY) asks him to cite one instance in which Karl Marx denounces war.

Jeanette Rankin (R-Montana) says war is a “stupid and futile way of attempting to settle international difficulties” and this one was caused by “commercial and selfish interests,” but this time votes for war, saying it’s not a real declaration of war but a “technicality” arising from the previous declaration of war on Germany.

No one pushes for Bulgaria and Turkey to be included, grumpily accepting Wilson’s argument that, like Austria, “They too, are tools of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not yet stand in the direct path of our proposed actions.” The US will end the war without having declared war on the two countries, or vice versa.

Halifax, hundreds of its houses in ruins after the munitions ship explosion yesterday, now faces a blizzard, because of course it does. Rescue work halts. “Many of the injured necessarily died of neglect.”

Finland declares independence from Russia.

Romanian troops who were fighting alongside Russians join the cease-fire, because what choice do they have? Austria starts releasing Russian prisoners even before Russia begins releasing Austria’s.

Recent German air raids on London show that Germany has switched completely from zeppelins to airplanes.

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Today -100: December 7, 1917: Of Halifax, baby factories, and contested elections

In the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the SS Mont-Blanc, carrying a big ol’ load of munitions, collides with a Belgian relief ship, drifts to land and goes boom. 2,000 or so dead. The largest explosion (not counting volcanoes) before 1945. Bits of the ship including the anchor are found miles away. The blast wave takes out every window in the city and a pretty good chunk of the city. Naturally, many assume it was a German plot.

The Croydon (UK) conscription tribunal upholds the plea of a widow that her, I believe, youngest son not join his 10 brothers in the military.

There will be a 10-day cease-fire between Russia and Germany.

In Parliament, Chief Secretary for Ireland Henry Duke says that Éamon de Valera’s election as MP for East Clare can be challenged by any elector in the constituency because he may not actually be British (the future president of Ireland was born in New York).

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Today -100: December 6, 1917: Lords of Looseness?

The House Committee on Foreign Relations passes the declaration of war on Austria with no dissenters. Everyone except Clarence Miller (R-Minnesota) falls in line behind Wilson’s decision not to include Bulgaria and Turkey.

Incidentally, this is another of those “recognizes that a state of war exists” declarations of war.

Rudyard Kipling has a new bad poem out. Evidently Bunyan predicted World War I, or something:

Likewise the Lords of Looseness
  That hamper faith and works,
The Perseverance-Doubters,
  And Present-Comfort shirks,
With brittle intellectuals
  Who crack beneath a strain--
John Bunyan met that helpful set
  In Charles the Second's reign.

Etc.

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Today -100: December 5, 1917: This is a war of high principle, debased by no selfish ambition of conquest or spoliation

Woodrow Wilson, in his State of the Union address (as they didn’t call it yet) to the new session of Congress, asks it to declare war on the Austria-Hungarian Empire but not Bulgaria or Turkey. He says his goal is not to “impair or rearrange” the Empire. Oh, it so is. He portrays the populations of Austria, Turkey and the Balkans as in need, just as much as those of Belgium and northern France, of liberation from the “impudent and alien dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy”.

Impudent and alien dominions are the worst kind.

So really, declaring war on Austria is for the benefit of Austria, which these days is “simply the vassal of the German Government.” This great act of charity extends even to Germans: “We are in fact fighting for their emancipation from fear, along with our own”. But do we ever get a thank you? no, we do not.

Wilson responds to critics of the war: “I hear the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of the nation. I hear men debate peace who understand neither its nature nor the way in which we may attain it, with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut about their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”

Gen. Nikolay Dukhonin, who refused to give up his self-designated title of Supreme Commander of the Russian military, is removed from office with extreme prejudice by “infuriated members of the Bolsheviki.”

Hey, Apocalypse Now was nearly 40 years ago, do people still understand “extreme prejudice” references?

Siberia and Ukraine have declared themselves independent republics.

Secretary of War Newton Baker denies that there is any discrimination against negroes in the (segregated) army and says any complainants are suffering from “overworked hysteria.”

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Today -100: December 4, 1917: Of armistices, debauched soldiers and sailors, legations, rustlers, and teachers

A new session of Congress opens. Everyone wants to declare war on Austria, and maybe Bulgaria and Turkey as well. They’re weirdly excited by the prospect.

Germany says there are local armistices in place with the Russian army at the division and corps levels.

New Rochelle, NY saloon owners are indicted for conspiracy to debauch soldiers and sailors. Which I guess just means letting them buy booze.

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky fires 160 Russian legations and consulates abroad who don’t recognize the Bolshevik government.

American troops invade Mexico and have a pitched battle with some cattle-rustlers, killing 35 of them.

The High School Committee puts on “trial” the 3 suspended De Witt Clinton High School (Bronx) teachers. Samuel Schmalhausen is accused of not rebuking one of his students for an essay calling Woodrow Wilson a murderer in such a way as to force the student to perceive the “gross disloyalty involved in his point of view” and even saying he didn’t think it was his job to “develop in the students under his control instinctive respect for the president of the United States as such”. They drag in the student, who says he didn’t get the ideas from Schmalhausen but from books and his own thinking. He was then hanged as a witch, probably.

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Today -100: December 3, 1917: Of ambassadors, mad carousels (mad carousels are the worst kind), antis, and teaching German

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky responds to letters from the US and French military missions protesting Russian armistice and possible separate-peace plans, saying Russia “cannot permit allied diplomatic and military agents to interfere in the internal affairs of our country and attempt to excite civil war.”

Trotsky appoints Georgy Chicherin as ambassador to Britain. Chicherin is an exile from the 1905 Revolution currently held in Brixton Prison in Britain for writing against the war. Trotsky wants him and another Russian political prisoner in Britain released and is threatening to hold English supporters of counter-revolution in reprisal (and tomorrow will ban any British subjects from leaving Russia).

Headline of the Day -100: 

I can’t tell if the NYT reporter really enjoyed this meeting or really felt out of place.

Mad carousel?

New York anti-suffragists will work to oppose the federal suffrage amendment and not to repeal women’s suffrage in New York. They figure women will just get tired of all the voting. Why, in a couple of years it’ll be current suffragists calling for repeal.

Pittsburgh orders the removal from high school German classes of all textbooks praising Kaiser Wilhelm or the German military system. Did language textbooks actually do this?

The good folks of Dyersburg, Tennessee burn a black man at the stake for allegedly attacking a white woman.

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Today -100: December 2, 1917: Wikileaks 1917

Russia releases another secret treaty, in which, as a price for Italy entering the war on the Allied side, it would get various bits of the Austrian Empire and control of Albania’s foreign policy if the Allies decided on an independent Albania instead of dividing it among Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. And if France and Britain take some of Germany’s African colonies, Italy gets some too. Italy undertook to try to prevent the pope working to end the war. Russia also reveals the territorial bribes offered Greece (which didn’t bite). American officials are pretending to believe that the documents might be forgeries and that Italy, to whose aid the US is planning to go, was not massively bribed to enter the war. Which it totally was.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Germany is said to be sending germ-infested balloons into the American trenches.

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Today -100: December 1, 1917: Of measles, ensigns, and knitting

US army camps in the South have been fighting measles outbreaks.

Russian military Supreme Commander Nikolai Krylenko is having trouble getting the Russian military to accept his supreme commanderness, possibly because he’s just an ensign. He orders the arrest of generals and the disbandment of soldiers’ committees which don’t recognize his authority.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Netherlands adopts universal male suffrage and proportional representation and allows women to be elected to public office, though there is no women’s suffrage.

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Today -100: November 30, 1917: Of coalitions and negotiations

The Bolsheviks are having difficulty establishing control. Doing less well than expected in the Constituent Assembly elections, they will be forced into a coalition government, at least temporarily.

German Chancellor Georg von Hertling says he’s willing to negotiate peace with the Bolsheviks, as soon as they send negotiators.

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Today -100: November 29, 1917: Anarchists and Wobblies and food riots, oh my!

The commissioner of immigration claims that Italian anarchists, allied with the IWW, planned to start food riots, starting with Boston.

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Today -100: November 28, 1917: They tried to terrorize and suppress us. They could not, and so freed us.

Germany says that if Norway joins the war, it will feel obligated to occupy Denmark on general principles.

The War Dept says the bodies of American soldiers killed in Europe will not be brought home until after the war.

Someone’s spreading rumors that Lenin is being advised by a bunch of German staff officers.

The NYT points to the recent increase in government surveillance of enemy aliens as a good reason not to declare war on Austria-Hungary, thereby increasing the number of enemy aliens who must be expensively surveilled.

22 of the hunger-striking suffragettes are ordered released before their terms have been served, including Alice Paul, who says “We are put out of jail as we were put into jail, at the whim of the Government. They tried to terrorize and suppress us. They could not, and so freed us.” Suffrage prisoners who did not hunger strike have not been released.

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Today -100: November 27, 1917: Of nobles, despotism not liberty, and raiders

Russia abolishes the nobility.

The NYT complains that the Bolshevik regime is establishing “Despotism, Not Liberty,” although its Burkean conception of liberty suggests it takes 5 or 6 centuries to establish.

The foreign ambassadors to Russia (i.e., those from the Allies) have a meeting and decide to simply ignore Trotsky’s note proposing an armistice. They also decide that if Russia begins separate peace negotiations, they will leave the country and treat it as a declaration of war on Russia’s former allies.

Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who headed the semi-private Jameson Raid intended to start a war with the Boer republics so they could be absorbed into South Africa, as did happen a couple of years later with the Boer War, dies at 64.

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Today -100: November 26, 1917: The armistice will be attained by revolutionary methods

Lenin: “Our party never said it would give peace immediately. We said we would make an immediate proposal for peace, and would publish the secret treaties. That we have done, and now begin the revolutionary struggle for peace. Victory is assured. The armistice will be attained by revolutionary methods.”

Speaking of secret treaties, it seems France planned on taking back not just Alsace and Lorraine, but the left bank of the Rhine as well.

Kerensky, still in hiding, resigns.

Self-proclaimed Supreme Commander Gen. Nikolay Dukhonin refuses to give up the post to Bolshevik-appointed Nikolai Krylenko, who is a 32-year-old ensign.

Dr. Elsie Inglis dies. A long-time suffrage activist, early in the war Inglis formed the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Units and sent women-only-staffed hospitals to the front in places like Serbia, France and Russia after the War Office turned down her offer to provide (and fund) hospitals (“My good lady, go home and sit still” was the exact phrase). The Red Cross also turned her down, but Serbia didn’t. She was taken prisoner for three months in 1915 when her hospital was overrun. She has died at 53 of cancer.

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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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