Today -100: January 28, 1918: Of black storks, ruling by force, and happy independence day, Ukrainia!

Dr. Harry Haiselden of the German-American Hospital in Chicago allows yet another baby with birth defects to die, because “it... would have been a burden to itself and its parents.” I think the pronoun you’re looking for is “she,” doctor. This is at least the 5th time he’s done this, one of which resulted in a 1915 coroner’s trial in which he was acquitted. He then gave lectures on eugenics and even acted in a movie about the case, “The Black Stork” aka “Are You Fit to Be Married,” playing a eugenicist doctor named Dr. Dickey (!).

Ukraine’s parliament (Rada) votes 508-4 for complete independence for Ukraine.

German Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann accuses the Bolsheviks of “ruling by force.” And your point is?

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 27, 1918: Of the Marseillaise, separate peaces, wheatless days, and Tarzan of the Apes

German Social Democratic Party leader Philipp Scheidemann responds to Chancellor Georg von Hertling’s speech, saying Germany’s leaders will be “hurled from power” if peace is not made with Russia. He says they wasted the opportunity for peace arising from the February Russian Revolution by escalating u-boat warfare and bringing in the US. He notes that unlimited submarine warfare was supposed to end the war in 6 months, but, you know, didn’t. However, he insists that Germany will keep Alsace-Lorraine.

Meetings held by the annexationist Pan-German Fatherland Party’s have lately been broken up by peace supporters. In Munich the pan-Germans tried to over-awe the disrupters with a rousing round of Deutschland Uber Alles, only to be drowned out by the Marseillaise.  That’s in Germany, not Casablanca.

Supposedly Austria has told Russia it’s willing to come to a peace agreement separate from Germany.

Food Dictator Herbert Hoover calls for 2 wheatless days a week, 2 porkless days, 1 wheatless and 1 meatless meal per day, and “Victory bread” which will be 20% non-wheat (corn, sawdust, that sort of thing).

Happy 59th birthday, Kaiser Wilhelm!

Now playing: The first Tarzan movie, starring Elmo Lincoln and Enid Markey.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 26, 1918: Of the unbroken joy of battle

German Chancellor Georg von Hertling responds to Wilson’s 14 Points speech and Lloyd George’s speech in an address to the Reichstag. He complains that Wilson and LG “speak with respect of Germany’s position, but their conception, ever afresh, finds expression as if we were the guilty who must do penance and promise improvement.” He says the army is in a great position right now and “in the officers and the men lives unbroken the joy of battle.” And Germany won’t give up Alsace-Lorraine, because it’s German! German! German! My favorite part of the speech is when he deals with Wilson’s 13th point, on Poland, saying that no one ever cared about Poland when Russia was “crushing her national characteristics,” but Germany and Austria-Hungary “liberated” Poland and can safely be trusted to come to an agreement on Poland’s future.

A deserter from the Germany Navy says there have been several recent revolts in the Navy, especially on mine-sweepers. He says a motorboat used its machine guns to break up one such mutiny, killing 44 sailors.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 25, 1918: Of treason, candy, and price increases

The Russian negotiators reject German demands that Russia give up Courland and the Baltic provinces.

The German socialist newspaper Vorwärts is suspended, as was the custom. This time it’s for reporting on the strikes in Austria. Also the Tageblatt, for the same reason. German military censors are only allowing the German public to be told that the strikes are because of food rations, rather than for peace and against German negotiating tactics that are prolonging the war.

The first US treason trial of the war begins. Paul C.H. Hennig, a naturalized US citizen from Germany, who worked in a Brooklyn torpedo-manufacturer and is accused of tampering with their gyroscopes. He says it’s a conspiracy by workers under him who resented his Germanic discipline.

Headline of the Day -100: 

As if the torpedoes weren’t bad enough. Navy canteens will no longer sell

candy, because impurities (possibly glass) have been found in some, whether from enemy agents or because the Navy bought from the lowest bidder is unclear.

From tomorrow, all New York newspapers currently selling for 1¢ will sell for 2¢. Other cities did this a while ago.

The cost to you to read this blog will therefore also double. There’s a war on, you know.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 24, 1918: Teddy’s back

Headline of the Day -100: 

Well, not really. Some Republican guests at TR’s son-in-law’s house seem to accept the “Colonel’s” leadership for 1920. One topic of discussion: whether it is patriotic to publicly criticize Wilson’s management of the war. I leave it to the reader to guess on what side of that argument Roosevelt falls.

TR wants Republicans to push for 1) compulsory military service, forever, 2) a War Cabinet and a Munitions director, 3) wartime measures such as control of the railroads expiring when the war ends.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 23, 1918: Of peace strikes and anthracite pools

Maxim Litvinov, the former revolutionary exile from Russia who is now serving as unofficial ambassador to Britain (because Britain doesn’t recognize the Bolshevik government), attends the annual Labour Party congress in Nottingham. He calls for revolution in Britain to end the war.

There’s a big peace strike in Austria. Some of this is standard dissatisfaction with the endless war, some of it is resentment that expansionist Germans are running the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with complete disregard for Austria.

Headline of the Day -100: 

He’ll stick to plain ol’ water.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 22, 1918: No longer necessary in a socialist state

The Romanovs are to be tried for treason. With lawyers and everything.

Idle Monday yesterday not only shut down factories but offices in skyscrapers whose elevators were not operating.

Woodrow Wilson denies that there is any inefficiency in the military establishment and says he will fight the moves in Congress to correct that inefficiency, such as creating a Director of Munitions and a streamlined War Cabinet.

Wilson “desires and enjoins” members of the military to follow the sabbath.

The decree dissolving the Russian Constituent Assembly issued by the Executive of the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates says that after the February Revolution, the Congress “perceived the illusion of an understanding with the bourgeoisie and its deceptive parliamentary organization”. Lenin says, “The Constituent Assembly is the highest expression of the political ideals of bourgeois society, which are no longer necessary in a socialist state.”

The Supreme Court rules that Puerto Rico is not a territory of the United States and the Constitution does not apply there.

The NY Philharmonic will no longer play music by living German composers. Beethoven is still okay, but sucks to be you, Strauss.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 21, 1918: At 4:00 this morning the Constituent Assembly was dissolved by sailors

The conscription authorities in the UK accidentally discover a female factory worker “masquerading in male attire,” one Ellen Harriet Capon (!), or Charles Brian Capon as she’s been calling herself. She says she did it in order to earn more money, although she was also dating a woman, so make of that what you will. That phrase, “masquerading in male attire,” is actually what Capon is charged with, because that’s actually a crime (I think the police court just called her a naughty girl and let her off, and she went back to work).

Lenin dissolves the Constituent Assembly, invoking authority that he pulls out of his ass, as was the custom. His decree reads in part: “At 4:00 this morning the Constituent Assembly was dissolved by sailors. Today a decree dissolving the Assembly will be published.”

The US War Dept will run psych evaluations on all soldiers.

Italy is pissed off at a speech by British Prime Minister Lloyd George in which he mentioned Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, but did he mention Italian territorial aspirations? No he did not.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 20, 1918: Of constituent assemblies, idle Mondays, and peace talks

The Russian Constituent Assembly meets and elects Viktor Chernov of the Social Revolutionary (SR) Party chair rather than the Bolshevik candidate. Chernov tells a reporter he doesn’t think the Bolsheviks will dissolve the Assembly. The Bolsheviks and Left SRs pull out after the Assembly refuses to give the Lenin government veto power. Armed sailors posted by the Bolsheviks loom threateningly and occasionally tell the delegates to go home.

Fuel Administrator Garfield agrees to allow theatres, cinemas, pool halls, bowling alleys and other places of amusement where booze is not sold to remain open on Idle Mondays – but they have to close on Tuesdays.

The Best-Litovsk peace talks are suspended, again. Germany is willing to commit to referenda in Poland, Lithuania and Courland about whether they want to be absorbed into Germany, within a year after the end of the war, but won’t commit to not occupying those areas militarily while the referenda are conducted.

Would you like to read an article in the Sunday NYT Magazine section entitled “Vivisection’s Many War Achievements”? Yeah, me neither.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 19, 1918: Of free passage, gas masks, and income taxes

Russia (actually the Revolutionary Committee of the 9th Army) gives an ultimatum to Romania demanding free passage through Jassy.

The US army is (according to the Providence Journal, so who knows if it’s true) sending back 200,000 gas masks because they’re “useless.” Soldiers are borrowing British and French gas masks, which smell respectively of... nah I’m not doing that joke. (Update: tomorrow the government will deny this story, but admits 20,000 gas masks were replaced by better ones.)

Headline of the Day -100: 

Rude.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 18, 1918: Of the disappointing American spirit, and kings

The Senate passes a resolution asking for the delay of Fuel Administrator Harry Garfield’s order to shut industries east of the Mississippi for the next 5 days and the following 10 Mondays to save on coal. So he signs the order while they’re still voting (Dems block a vote in the House).  Garfield says he doesn’t think employers will stop their workers’ wages during the idle days or “I shall be disappointed in the American spirit.” US Steel says it will disappoint Garfield in the American spirit.

Lenin orders the arrest of King Ferdinand of Romania. This follows the arrest a couple of days ago of the Romanian ambassador, from which Russia had to back down after the concerted opposition of all the other ambassadors in Petrograd. The story about the inciting incident keeps changing: the arrest by Romania of Austrian officers who wanted to fraternize with Russians during the current cease-fire, or the capture by Romania of Bolshevik irregulars doing god knows what.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 17, 1918: Of idle Mondays, Armenias, and assassination attempts

Fuel Administrator Harry Augustus Garfield responds to the coal shortage (really more a distribution problem than a supply problem) by ordering non-essential industries east of the Mississippi to close for 5 days and then for every one of the following 10 Mondays. No one is happy about this. Some congresscritters are wondering from where Garfield thinks the legal authority for this order derives. Garfield, who is the son of Pres. James Garfield and president of Williams College but is basically unknown, issued this far-reaching order with no advance notice.

It’s not just factories either, and Broadway theatres are pissed off, as, presumably, are the people whose jobs will be shut down on Monday but won’t be able to take advantage of the day off.

The Hungarian Cabinet resigns after Emperor Charles refuses their request for a separate Hungarian army.

Russia supports a free Armenia, including territory now held by both Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

A break (or even a coup) between German military and political leaders is averted, reports say, by a compromise in which there will be no annexations in the east that might screw up a peace with Russia but Hindenburg retains full authority to grab whatever land he wants in the West. Provided he wins the war, of course.

Someone shoots at Lenin’s car in Petrograd, breaking the windshield.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 16, 1918: Of religious maniacs, Polish Jews, and the tango

Russia arrests the Romanian ambassador and his staff, for reasons they will not disclose. The other ambassadors are worried/pissed off.

According to “news” that has reached Geneva, the former Czar Nicholas now “seeks only oblivion and silence” while Mrs. Czar “has become a religious maniac.” Become?

Officials from the Polish puppet regime meet with Jewish leaders, who are demanding that special laws and taxes applying only to Jews be abolished as they have been in Russia. The officials reply that instead, they might want to get all the Jews the hell out of Poland.

Supposedly, former French Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux was arrested because US Secretary of State Lansing informed France that Caillaux was in contact with the German Foreign Office when he visited Argentina in 1915. Also supposedly, the documents found in his bank deposit box in Italy show that in 1916 he was planning, if he became prime minister again, to order the arrests of several politicians and soldiers, including current Prime Minister Clemenceau. Also, everybody’s making a big deal about a supposed order by German censors for the press not to mention Caillaux at all.

The Vatican bans the tango.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

Today -100: January 15, 1918: Of treason, annexations, and juries of one’s socialist peers

France’s former Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux is arrested (the police held off for a day when they found he was having a dinner party, because France). Evidently... something... was found in a bank vault in Italy under his wife’s maiden name.

The NYT thinks the German military establishment is about to force out Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann and Chancellor Georg von Hertling. The military is grumbling at the possibility that peace talks won’t result in Germany annexing major territory and placing other areas (the Baltics, the Ukraine) under German “influence.”

Russo-German peace talks break down as Germany refuses to remove its troops from Lithuania, Courland, Riga, etc.

The US Supreme Court affirms that aliens in the US are subject to the draft. In another case, it rules that socialists were not tried unconstitutionally because jury members from other political parties were prejudiced against them. The Court says, hey we’re okay with black people being tried by all-white juries, so...

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.”

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.

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.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.