Today -100: January 14, 1918: Of curtseying to Bolshevist authority and cussing out mules

At the Brest-Litovsk conference, the Germans complain that while the talks were recessed, Russians officials were talking about their hopes for a revolution in Germany. The Germans say they’ve very politely refrained from talking about internal conditions in Russia. Go ahead and talk, Trotsky responds.

Izvestia says Wilson’s 14 Points speech is “a great victory in the great struggle for democratic peace”. Pravda, on the other hand, calls Wilson a representative of capitalism and says the 14P are a mask for the old war formulas and for “plundering under the mask of self-definition of nations”; “the American Bourse found it necessary not only to reckon with the Bolshevist authority, but to make its curtsey to it.”

US Army muleteers are ordered to stop cussing out lazy mules.

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Today -100: January 13, 1918: Wilson is seeking a way out of war

German newspapers are interpreting Wilson’s 14 Points speech in different ways. The Frankfurter Zietung, for example, thinks it shows that Wilson realizes the Allies can't win the  war; “Wilson is seeking a way out of war, although he is doing it in a manner not yet quite acceptable to us.” The paper seems to think the US has given up on getting Alsace-Lorraine back for France, which is very much not what Wilson said.

Russia gives in to Germany’s refusal to remove the peace talks from occupied Brest-Litovsk to a neutral country (which many think was a Germany ploy to force a break in talks). The armistice is extended a month.

Lithuania declares independence. Well, a bunch of Lithuanians in Stockholm declare independence anyway. They have rather expansive ideas about what constitutes Lithuania, including areas presently part of Germany such as Königsberg (Kaliningrad), the capital of East Prussia, as well as all of Russian Lithuania. They point out that they have names in Lithuanian for the territories they’re claiming, and if that doesn’t prove they rightfully belong to Lithuania then they just don’t know what more proof you need.

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Today -100: January 12, 1918: Morally dished

Germany withdraws its Christmas offer of a peace without annexations or indemnities, since only Russia was willing to talk to them about it.

Former NYC Boy-Mayor John Purroy Mitchel joins the Army Aviation Service. Don’t forget to fasten your seatbelt, Mr. Boy-Mayor!

Spoiler Alert: He will totally forget to fasten his seatbelt.

Food Czar Herbert Hoover calls for still more food savings in the US so meat exports to France, Britain and Italy can be doubled. While he’s not proposing rationing, he does plan to send out thousands of agents to prosecute hoarders – regular consumers as well as wholesalers.

On Feb. 4, the US will start registering all Germans in the Southern District of New York, which means photographing and fingerprinting all males 14 and older.

Christabel Pankhurst says women’s suffrage will be used in Britain for “disciplining democracy.” Kinky!

Mary Kilbreth, acting president of the New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, says “representative government has been wrecked” by Congress’s vote for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and a “woman autocracy” established. She hopes the American people won’t “tamely submit to the yoke.” Kinky! Anti-suffragist women will have to use their ballots to elect men who have not yet lost “all the male instincts of domination and sovereignty.” JUST. SO. KINKY!

George Bernard Shaw writes a letter to the Daily Chronicle about the recent proliferation of statements (from Wilson, Lloyd George, etc) about war aims: “The bidding for peace took a long time to start, but now that it is started it is bewilderingly brisk. It seems only yesterday that to have any war aims at all was denounced as the blackest pro-German treason. Victory, a smashing, triumphant victory, without any ulterior object whatever except ‘the crushing of Prussian militarism,’ (the same thing in other words,) was the whole aspiration of the pugnacious patriot.” It suited Germany’s rulers that “we should keep declaring that we were out to crush them. That was precisely what they had been telling the German people”. But with the Russian Revolution there is a new situation “in which it was extremely important to all belligerents that they should appear in the character of grievously molested Quakers, reluctantly forced to defend their countries against imperialist aggression.  To take up the pacifist position in the moral tug-of-war that goes on between Governments in their appeals to the conscience of civilization the Germans suddenly let go the rope, and we sat down with a crash. We were morally dished.” Wilson backed down from demanding a complete democratization of Prussia and set out the 14 Points (which no one is calling that yet , by the way), and “any sort of definite war aims must seem so clear and reasonable in contrast with the crude ravings they replace, that we are for the moment cheated into believing that the Germans must think them as moderate as they seem to us.” Shaw declines to “join the ranks of those kindly people who cry peace when there is no peace.” Rather, “When both sides become convinced that neither of them can both win and survive the effort, then it will be time to talk of peace.”

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Today -100: January 11, 1918: A question of evolution

The House of Representatives votes 274 to 136 in favor of the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, which is exactly the 2/3 vote required. All very dramatic. Democrats were 104 to 102 in favor, Republicans 165 to 33 in favor. A proposal for a 7-year deadline for ratification, such as the one attached to the prohibition amendment, fails. The opening speech is made by the first and only woman congresscritter, Jeanette Rankin (R-Montana). “We are facing a question of evolution,” she says. She argues that during the war, when American soldiers are dying for lack of a woolen shirt, women, who unlike men think in terms of human needs, might have something to contribute.

The House of Lords, which is usually firmly against evolution, rejects Lord Loreburn’s amendment to remove women’s suffrage from the Representation of the People Bill by an astonishing 134 to 71, despite warnings from Lord Curzon that it would lead to socialism and disturb home life and that in a future war men might resist being conscripted by the female vote. The Lord Chancellor added that pacifists might work on politically inexperienced women and force an inconclusive peace. Every bishop and archbishop who voted supported the women’s suffrage provision.

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Today -100: January 10, 1918: Of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, ex-villages, and mutinies

Woodrow Wilson reverses his previous position that women’s suffrage should be determined at the state rather than the federal level, and comes out in support of the federal constitutional amendment “as an act of right of justice.” He was evidently influenced in part by the granting of suffrage to women in Britain. And by the fact that the Republican Party came out in favor of it first. The NYT, anti assholes to the end, accuses the Democrats of chicken-heartedness.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Gen. Hindenburg is reported by Matin to have ordered the destruction of 130 French villages behind the Western front.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Boy is that headline over-selling the story. The crew of the Portuguese battleship Vasco de Gama mutinies and fires on a fort, which fires back, the government retakes the ship, the end.

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Today -100: January 9, 1918: Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s not polite to point?

Woodrow Wilson, as is his wont, calls Congress into session with almost no advance warning so he can make a speech at them. This is the 14 Points speech, in which he lays out the basis for peace and the post-war rearrangement of the map of Europe. These are:

1. Open peace treaties established by open diplomacy with no secret bits.
2. Freedom of navigation of the seas.
3. Free and equal trade conditions (Republicans are not so thrilled with the free trade bit).
4. Reduction of armaments.
5. Adjustment of colonial claims, with consideration of the interests of the colonial populations (guess who gets to decide what those interests are? not the colonial populations, that’s for sure).
6. Withdrawal of occupation troops from Russia.
7. The restoration of Belgium.
8. And France, to which Alsace-Lorraine will be returned.
9. Enlargement of Italy along lines of nationality.
10. “Autonomous development” of the peoples of the Austrian Empire (he’s being a bit vague on whether this means breaking up the Empire).
11. Restoration of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro.
12. More autonomous development, this time for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, which Wilson rather more clearly intends to break up.
13. An independent Poland.
14. A League of Nations.

This is the first time Wilson has publicly supported France and Italy’s aspirations to reclaim territories lost in the 19th century to Germany and Austria respectively.

George Creel, head the Committee on Public Information, decides that his remit now includes propagandizing abroad. Without asking the State Department, he sends Vira Boarman Whitehouse to Europe to spread the good news about the US’s war aims. Whitehouse’s previous experience in publicity was for the women’s suffrage movement in New York.

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Today -100: January 8, 1918: Of self-determination, soldiers & suffrage, and conscription

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) says a lasting peace can only be based on the principle of self-determination, putting them at odds with the increasingly aggressive annexationists (encouraged by Hindenburg and Ludendorff).

Since soldiers voted by mail in November’s elections, it is possible to see how they voted in aggregate. Soldiers from New York voted 26,664 in favor of the women’s suffrage referendum and 15,760 against. Soldiers from New York City voted 17,428 for and 8,323 against.

The US Supreme Court rules in 7 cases that conscription is constitutional, saying that governmental power isn’t real without sanction, that is, sanction against non-consenting US citizens. “[T]he very conception of a just Government and its duty to the citizen includes the reciprocal obligation of the citizen to render military service in case of need and the right to compel it.” That’s... really weak logic. The problem is that the Constitution only gives the federal government the power to raise an army, it doesn’t say how, and World War I was the only the second time conscription was used. The 14th Amendment, which some lawyers argued invalidates the draft, on the contrary, the Court says, “broadened the national scope of the Government by causing citizenship of the United States to be paramount and dominant.” That... in no way follows. The Court doesn’t even bother making up more crap arguments about why the 13th Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude doesn’t apply, saying the argument that it does is just “refuted by its mere statement.”

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Today -100: January 7, 1918: Of Frankensteins, Yugoslavs coming in, and bank accounts

NYT correspondent Harold Williams, who admits “I do not understand the Bolsheviki” but is sure that German secret agents created the Russian Bolshevik movement, or something, says of the peace negotiations, “The Germans, having created a Frankenstein for their own purposes, seem to be considerably perplexed by his antics.” And back then a NYT reader who wanted to say “ACTUALLY, Frankenstein was the MONSTER” would have to dip a pen in an inkwell, write it down on stationary, and mail it in. Who says civilization hasn’t progressed?

Headline of the Day -100: 

British Prime Minister Lloyd George gave a speech a couple of days ago, which I skipped, sorry, in which he added to the Allied war aims the breaking off from the Austrian Empire of any nationalities who wanted to do so, especially Poland, but also areas with large Italian and Romanian populations who might want to be annexed by Italy and Romania. Now the “Southern Slavs” (Croats, Slovenians and the like) are asking, Hey, what about us?

Russia and Ukraine have come to some sort of armistice deal.

Foreign Minister Trotsky forbids banks releasing funds deposited by foreign embassies until their home countries hand over deposits made by the Tsarist government in banks in those countries.

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Today -100: January 6, 1918: Of peace talks, spelling, and electric chairs

For some reason, Russia is trying very hard to have the peace talks transferred from Brest-Litovsk to Stockholm, and Germany is resisting very hard.

A decree orders the adoption of phonetic spelling of Russian next week, eliminating 3 vowels and a consonant.

Headline of the Day -100: 

These are in fact electric WHEELchairs for wounded soldiers.

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Today -100: January 5, 1918: We can quietly wait and see how the incident will pass off

German Chancellor Georg von Hertling tells the Reichstag that Germany will refuse Russia’s request that it withdraw its troops from occupied territories in the east before holding referenda on whether they’d care to be annexed by Germany. “We can quietly wait and see how the incident will pass off.”

Rep. Jeannette Rankin introduces a resolution in favor of Irish independence, and another for equal wages for women and men.

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Today -100: January 4, 1918: Of peace talks, ambassadors, and rice

Izvestia publishes, and denounces, Germany’s negotiating terms. Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky also denounces them. But everyone knows that Russia is in no shape to resume the war, so it is, as they say in Russian, fucked.

Trotsky is naming new ambassadors. The ones he names for Britain, Switzerland and Sweden were all political exiles under the tsar.

Ukraine demands that the Russian Bolsheviks withdraw their troops within 24 hours and say whether or not Russia and Ukraine are at war now.

There’s a war on, you know:

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Today -100: January 3, 1918: Of peace talks, trusts, plots, and translations

The Russo-German peace negotiations are not going well. Germany is claiming that Poland, Lithuania, Courland and parts of Estonia and Livonia have all declared their desire to be free of Russia, and Germany accordingly recognizes them and won’t withdraw troops from them because they’re no longer Russia (Germany is clearly planning to annex them). Trotsky notes that since those areas are under German occupation they can hardly have expressed themselves freely. Since Ukraine has said it won’t be bound by negotiations to which it is not party, Germany wants to retain its troops in strategic points, including Riga. Russia has demanded that Germany release imprisoned German socialists, which Germany says is an internal matter.

Attorney General Thomas Gregory asks the Supreme Court to defer hearings on 7 anti-trust cases (including suits against US Steel, Eastman Kodak, and Quaker Oats) because of the war.

Albert Kaltschmidt, on his way to Leavenworth for plotting (before the US entered the war) to blow up munitions plants and the like in the US and Canada, says “Germany will bring the United States to its knees, which would all have been prevented had not German-Americans been inefficient, stupid, white-feathered, and cowardly” and not defeated Wilson in 1916. For example, he says, he organized a Bund in Detroit ostensibly to raise funds for widows and orphans of German soldiers but really to propagandize against the US entering the war, and those stupid literal-minded Germans insisted the money go to widows and orphans of German soldiers.

The editor of the St. Paul Die Freie Presse is arrested for giving the government inaccurate translations of articles in his paper, such as ones praising the Austrian offensive in Italy.

In The Tribunal, the newspaper of the (British) No-Conscription Fellowship, Bertrand Russell writes that if the Allies refuse Germany’s peace offer, it will “make it clear to all that they are continuing the war for purposes of territorial aggrandisement.” Further warfare will lead to mass starvation. “The American Garrison which will by that time be occupying England and France, whether or not they will prove efficient against the Germans, will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home.” For criticizing an ally, Russell will be sentenced to 6 months in prison.

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Today -100: January 2, 1918: Of flags

Finland is the first of the bits of Russia which have declared independence to choose a flag: a lion with a weird sword on a red background.

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Today -100: January 1, 1918: Happy 1918!

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Today -100: December 31, 1917: Of earthquakes and peace

An earthquake, actually part of a series that isn’t over yet, largely wipes out  Guatemala City. The world will rush aid to Guatemala, and President Cabrera will sell that aid and keep the money for himself, as is the custom.

Bulgaria accepts Russian peace proposals.

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Today -100: December 30, 1917: Of phantom bases and unconscious perverts

Headline of the Day -100: 

They were ordered to report to the ordinance base, which does not exist. Locals are struggling to house them all. More will come tomorrow and the army is skeptical when local officials phone to inform them there’s no ordinance base here, really there isn’t.

The NAACP holds its 7th annual conference. Someone claiming to be from the Committee of Public Information, the government censorship and propaganda body, but who refuses to give his name, warns against stirred hatred among black soldiers against white soldiers and says Germany is trying to make black people believe black soldiers are being discriminated against in the (segregated) military. Perish the thought.

The NYT Sunday Magazine has an article by Dr. Mary Keyt Isham, who says pacifism is associated with “a certain type of unconscious pervert,” i.e., they’re bottoms, who are naturally drawn to Prussian sadism, or something.

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Today -100: December 29, 1917: Of separate peaces, banks, and feet

Trotsky warns the Allies that if they don’t join the peace negotiations within 10 days, Russia will make a separate peace. He seems to think there will be plebiscites in Alsace-Lorraine and the former German colonies about what country they’d like to be attached to; Germany has other views.

Russia seizes all private banks (in Petrograd anyway).

Belarus secedes from Russia.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: December 28, 1917: Of stimulated France, independent socialists, and ferdinands

Headline of the Day -100: 

The French, eh? It’s just sex sex sex with them.

The German military rounds up hundreds of members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) on Christmas Eve, naturally.

The Central Powers respond to Russian peace proposals, saying they’re ok with an immediate general peace without annexations (and Germany wants its colonies back) or indemnities (although there is some difference over compensation for the cost of upkeep of POWs). King Ferdinand of Bulgaria immediately says that the Austrian foreign minister, who was supposed to be speaking on behalf of the Quadruple Alliance, doesn’t speak for Bulgaria, which intends to keep ever inch of land it’s seized in Serbia, Romania, and Greece.

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Today -100: December 27, 1917: Of bandits, godmothers, railroads, and visibly tiring Russians

US troops cross into Mexico to kill Mexican bandits (possibly Pancho Villa affiliated), as was the custom.

The US Army is trying to dissuade American women from “adopting” US soldiers in France – “godmothers” they’re calling themselves – and sending them stuff, because it’s clogging up the mails. Also, censorship regs forbid soldiers corresponding with strangers.

The US government will take control of the railroads tomorrow. Pres. Wilson will be guaranteeing the profits of the railroad companies, because of course he will.

NYT: “Russia is visibly tiring of the Bolsheviki; they may be overthrown at any time. They are without one vestige of legal authority to speak for Russia, they have no standing among nations.”

Prof. Jan Kucharzewski, the puppet prime minister of puppet Poland, says there is a lot of support for making the Austrian emperor the king of Poland, and it should definitely be done before any elections.

The NYC Board of Education decides to end all foreign language instruction in elementary schools next year (65% of the students taking a language were studying German).

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Today -100: December 26, 1917: Of troop transfers, conspiracies, and rotating governors

Russian Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky is pissed that, while peace negotiations are going on, Germany is transferring troops from the Russian front to the Western front, like they were supposed not to do.

The US government claims to have proof of a world-wide conspiracy of American Wobblies, Russian Bolsheviks, Irish Fenians etc to overthrow the existing order. This follows the discovery of some weapons on the Russian freighter Shilka, which they think were intended for the Wobblies. But somehow they’re also still pretending to believe that the IWW is paid by and operating on behalf of Germany.

Following the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision that George Hunt was elected governor last year after all, he resumes the office and offers his unseated predecessor a job on the state tax commission, which he declines.

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