Today -100: March 12, 1918: As an American I had a legal right to keep my seat

Woodrow Wilson writes to the Russian people to tell them how sorry he is about the way Germany is treating them and promising that the US will “avail itself of every opportunity to secure for Russia once more complete sovereignty and independence in her own affairs and full restoration to her great role in the life of Europe and the modern world.” The timing of the message is presumed to intend to reassure Russia about the Japanese intervention in Siberia.

Rep. Henry De Flood (D-Virginia) introduces a bill to bar states from letting enemy aliens who have taken out their first naturalization papers but are not yet US citizens vote, as 10 states do.

A revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession opens on Broadway. Members of the police attend but do not arrest anyone, as they did at the NY premiere in 1905, when they arrested, well, everyone, right in the middle of the performance on the opening (and also closing) night. This version, like the 1905, stars Mary Shaw (no relation).

A Chicago lawyer is arrested in a theatre for failing to rise for the Star Spangled Banner, because he was tired and “As an American I had a legal right to keep my seat.” The judge disagrees and fines him $50 and tells him he’s lucky he wasn’t beaten up. The article neglects to say what the actual legal charge was.

Oh the humanity:

D.W. Griffith’s war movie Hearts of the World, starring the Gish sisters, premieres in Los Angeles.

I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like the same melodrama plot as Birth of a Nation, with German would-be rapists instead of black ones and French troops riding to the rescue instead of Kluxers.

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Today -100: March 11, 1918: Yes, this WAS the only thing that happened that day

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Today -100: March 10, 1918: Only Lenin is left

Leon Trotsky resigns as Russian foreign minister. Ensign Nikolai Krylenko is also out as military Commander in Chief. The NYT, maintaining its track record of perfect precognition regarding Russia, says “only Lenine is left, and he not for long.”

A new anti-Bolshevik White movement pops up, headed by Prince Georgi Lvov (currently in China), who was prime minister after the February Revolution, and Admiral Alexander Kolchak (“The Night Stalker”), former commander of the Black Sea Fleet. They plan to ride into power, in Siberia at least, with the backing of the Japanese.

In Newark, an Austrian is jailed for 10 days for saying “To hell with the United States.” The judge also threatens him with being hanged from a lamppost “if your kind is not careful.”

New Jersey Gov. Walter Edge orders all law officers to enforce the Anti-Loafing Act requiring all men aged 18 to 50 to have some sort of employment, even if they’re too rich to need to work.

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Today -100: March 9, 1918: Of princes and grand duchesses, spring planting, and dead soldiers

Finland’s “government” asks Kaiser Wilhelm to appoint his #5 son Prince Oskar as Finland’s king.

On the other hand, Germany keeps sending princes to occupied Luxemburg to woo Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde, but she keeps refusing to marry them.

Russia issues the demobilization order to its army required under the Brest-Litovsk agreement, but simultaneously orders the arming of the entire people. The treaty needs to be ratified by the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets next week, which isn’t a slam dunk.

Congress passes a bill allowing furloughs for soldiers still in training camps in the US for spring planting.

The US Dept of War has decided to stop releasing the addresses or any other details beyond the names of dead soldiers. The Committee on Public Information, considering it of no use to anyone to give newspapers just a list of names, declines to pass the information on. It points out that some soldiers have the same names as other soldiers, so without an address...

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Today -100: March 8, 1918: A war between Odin and Christ

Some of the German army is still advancing into Russia. Perhaps they haven’t gotten the word that they’re not supposed to? They are 68 miles from Petrograd.

Former secretary of state, secretary of war, and senator Elihu Root tells a Carnegie Hall meeting that “This is not a war for Serbia, for Alsace-Lorraine, for Poland, even for Belgium. It is a war between Odin and Christ.” You mean, Wotan, dummy, the US didn’t declare war on the Vikings.

Ford Motor Company will make tanks. Little baby tanks.

The chief of the military police in Hoboken, New Jersey says he will use the unlimited power which he claims to have to clean up vice in the city and suppress prostitution, arresting any woman found out at night and trying them by military tribunal. He’s also going after chop suey restaurants for some reason.

The Post Office bars Metropolitan Magazine from the mails (a little late, it’s already gone out), evidently because of an article by William Hard, “Is America Honest?” which suggests that the US treatment of Puerto Rico makes it hypocritical for Wilson to criticize, say, Germany. Fun fact: Theodore Roosevelt is a well-paid regular contributor to Metropolitan. (Update: the PO will claim it didn’t bar the magazine from the mails, merely told the local postmaster to exercise pre-censorship over future issues).

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And in 3 days the first case of Spanish Flu in the US will show up at the army hospital in Fort Riley, Kansas.

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Today -100: March 7, 1918: Of burning home fires, the cooperation of God, admirable qualities of the Irish character, and moving

Lena Guilbert Ford, who wrote the lyrics for “Keep the Home Fires Burning” (1914) dies in a fire in her home in London, started by a German bomb falling on it, because Germans are nothing if not literal. Her son is also killed. They are the first US citizens killed in a London air raid.

The Wisconsin State Assembly joins the state Senate in censuring Sen. Robert La Follette’s attitude toward the war.

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Romania signs a preliminary peace treaty with the Central Powers. It will give up territory, Germany will control its railroads, German goods will enter Romania tariff-free but not vice versa, etc.

Irish Nationalist Party leader John Redmond dies. The NYT says he “had the admirable qualities of the Irish character without its defects,” unlike certain other Irishmen it could name.

The Russian government will move to Moscow. It’s almost like they don’t trust the Germans not to break the peace treaty.

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Today -100: March 6, 1918: Of Romanian farts, women voters, and malingers

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Oh, PART. I totally misread that.

Evidently the US won’t be silently consenting to Japan invading Siberia and occupying Vladivostok after all, but will weakly object because it violates the 14 Points.

Democrats win 4 special congressional elections in New York, giving them a small majority in Congress. Women vote in the state for the first time (the NYT is especially impressed, or something, by the presence of baby buggies at polling stations), and there’s even a woman candidate in the 21st District, Mamie Colvin for the Prohibition Party.

Woodrow Wilson orders the removal from the manual for medical advisory boards implementing the draft of these words: “The foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native born.” The sentence was included by “inadvertence.”

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Today -100: March 5, 1918: Of occupations, inbred courtesy, pickets, enemy aliens, and booty. Big booty.

Germany says it will occupy all of Finland “temporarily.” Sweden is not best pleased.

The British Parliament votes £25,000 for the widow of Maj. Gen. Frederick Stanley Maude, the commander of the Mesopotamian campaign who conquered Baghdad. The cause of his death in November, according to Lloyd George, was courtesy: he was too polite to refuse a cup of something or other when visiting natives in a cholera-ridden region of Iraq. Guess what he died from. Courtesy, that’s right, inbred courtesy. LG calls him “the gentlest conqueror who ever entered a city’s gates.”

The DC Court of Appeals rules that it was not illegal for suffragists to picket the White House. Their convictions are reversed and they will be suing for damages.

The House passes a bill to subject female enemy aliens to the same restrictions (registration, residency restrictions, other things beginning with R) as males.

The Allies will indeed ask Japan to occupy Vladivostok, except for the US, which nevertheless has no objections. Japan won’t be asked to promise not to annex territory, because that would just be insulting.

Howard Heinz, the federal food administrator for Pennsylvania and I’m pretty sure one of the baked beans Heinzes, says “We will not be a strictly free people until 10,000 German propagandists in this state have been hanged to telegraph poles and shot full of holes.” He blames rumors spread by German agents for food conservation not being more effective.

Germany has arrested and deported a bunch of Belgian judges, including some on the Court of Appeal in Brussels, which protests by suspending its activities. The judges protested German attempts to break Flanders off of Belgium. Germany bans all discussion of politics throughout Belgium.

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Today -100: March 4, 1918: Of Brest-Litvosk, porkless Tuesdays, and suffragettes for senate

The Brest-Litovsk treaty is signed, and Germany finally stops its military actions against Russia, which included planes dropping bombs on Petrograd. Turkey will get back all the territory it lost to Russia in 4 wars over the last 90 years, including Russian Armenia, presumably because Turkey is running out of Armenians to massacre.

Food Administrator Herbert Hoover is now asking Americans to abstain from beef and pork only on Tuesday. But everyone should eat less bread. So no sandwiches, I guess.

Anne Martin announces that she is running for the US Senate for Nevada as an independent. A former professor of history in the University of Nevada, Martin led the successful women’s suffrage campaign in the state in 1914 and has since fought for the national amendment. She was one of the White House picketers last year and was sentenced to the workhouse. She will be the first woman to run for the Senate and receive 18% of the vote, not bad for an indy.

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Today -100: March 3, 1918: We could not refuse our help

Germany captures Kiev. Or “liberated” it, as they put it.

Austria will also send troops into Ukraine. Because Ukraine asked it to, or so Austria says. “We could not refuse our help,” says Prime Minister Ernst Seidler. That would have just been rude.

Labor Secretary William Wilson orders immigration officials in the Northwest to start deporting foreign anarchists (i.e., IWW members), whether or not they’ve actually done anything.

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Today -100: March 2, 1918: Of peace talks, barbed wire, Broadway lights, and kats

A rather unclear message from Brest-Litovsk leads the Russian government to believe that the Germans have broken off peace talks. At any rate, Germany plans to keep invading right up to the signing of the peace treaty. Petrograd prepares for a siege.

The Allies ask Japan to invade Russia to secure Allied interests – protecting weapons stores in Vladivostok, that sort of thing – and certainly not to help overthrow the Bolshevik government, furthest thing from our minds.

The Cologne Gazette “reports” that New York City is now completely surrounded by 1,000 km of barbed wire fencing and that Hoboken is now empty because all the Germans have been forced out.

Austria will start drafting 17-year-olds.

Broadway theaters are allowed to turn their lights on again, the warmer weather having mitigated the coal shortage.

I’d forgotten about the new literacy requirement for immigrants, passed over Pres. Wilson’s veto. Roberto Piccinini of the Bronx has his citizenship blocked because he spelled cat with a K.

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Today -100: March 1, 1918: Of the Wigwam and evolution

Women can now join Tammany (the NY County Democratic Committee) as equal members.

Prof. Frederic Wood Jones, anatomy prof and physical anthropologist, gives a lecture at King’s College, London, in which he claims that humans are not descended from hominoid apes, but diverged substantially earlier, which is here presented as “Man Was Ancestor of Apes,” which is not what Jones is saying, but he’s still quite wrong.

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Today -100: February 28, 1918: Of cholms and pogroms, deserters, and rabbits

Russian troops are refusing to fight.

Foreign Minister Trotsky refuses to return to Brest-Litovsk to sign the capitulation to Germany, Zinoviev is sent instead (a later report will say that the Germans said they won’t negotiate with Trotsky anymore).

Polish protests against Cholm being given to Ukraine turn into anti-Jewish riots in Cracow, as was the custom.

Secretary of War Newton Baker rejects a general’s recommendation that deserters from army training camps in the US be executed. In fact, no deserters will be executed by the US this war even in Europe. 35 soldiers were executed during the war, all for non-military offenses like rape and murder of civilians.

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Today -100: February 27, 1918: Undertaken in the name of humanity

Germany, evidently not taking Russia’s “We fucking surrender already” as an answer (and not responding to the official surrender), has refused an armistice and is still advancing in Russia. Russians are resisting. The government calls on the people to defend Petrograd from the “imperialist assassins” and “cursed minions of Wilhelm and the German Kaledine, together with the White Guard, [who] are advancing against and shooting the Soviets, reconstituting the power of the landlords, bankers, and capitalists, and preparing for the restoration of the monarchy.”

Imperialist Assassin and German Chancellor Georg von Hertling addresses the Reichstag of Cursed Minions. He claims to agree with Wilson’s 14 Points, more or less (one example of less: Alsace-Lorraine). He rejects Wilson’s positing of Germany as “an antagonism between an autocratic government and a mass of people without rights.” Why, in Germany, “princes and Governments are the highest members of the nation as a whole,” whose decisions are guided only by the welfare of the whole. He says Germany’s warfare has always been defensive in aim, even where it is aggressive in action. For example, the current attack on Russia is only “to safeguard the fruits of our peace with Ukraine. Aims of conquest were in no way a determining factor.” And any further military operations “are solely taking place at the urgent appeals and representations of the populations for protection against atrocities and devastation by Red Guards and other hands. They have, therefore, been undertaken in the name of humanity.”

The British send troops into County Clare, as was the custom. Sinn Feiners and lawless types generally have been stealing cattle, cutting telegraph wires, seizing farms, etc.

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Today -100: February 26, 1918: He was in favor of revolutionary phrases before he was against them

Lenin writes in Pravda that the only people who think it was possible to refuse the German terms are “those who are intoxicated by revolutionary phrases. ... Only a blind man or men infatuated by phrases can fail to see that the policy of a revolution war without an army is water in the bourgeois mill.” He talks a lot about “phrases” and the men who love them. He means Trotsky.

The Wisconsin State Senate votes 26-3 to condemn Sen. Robert La Follette’s failure to support the war, and all others who “have failed to see the righteousness of our nation’s cause”.

Japan will send troops into Siberia to aid the Cossacks against the Bolsheviks. It will change that rationale to something a little less blatant in the days ahead.

An earthquake in China earlier this month is reported to have killed 10,000. Think there’ll be a follow-up to today -100’s 3-paragraph story? (Spoiler Alert: Nope, at least not by March 4).

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Not a metaphor!

And a new issue of The B.E.F. Times (formerly the The Wipers Times) is out.

The British trench paper suggests suggests that “there is so much that might be improved, and so many little inconveniences which might be done away with, if there were a better understanding on both sides.” It offers some ground rules for shelling:

1. No shelling will take place between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am.
2. Parties wishing to shell will notify their opponents of the exact hour and place to be shelled by sending over a dud T.M. [trench mortar] at a stipulated spot with a note inside.
3. Any sheller sending his obus [shell] into any H.Q. or dug-out will forfeit two turns.
4. A shellee on being struck by his opponent will immediately retire from the contest. ...
7. Unlimited whisky to be supplied at the 19th hole by the losing side.

Fake ad from Souvenir Manufacturing Company (“To please your best girl, it is clear, You must procure a souvenir.”)

German shoulder straps: 1s each or 10s a dozen
Ditto, Bloodstained: 1/6 each of 15s a dozen
Shell holes, complete: 50s each
Duckboards – English: 5s each
Ditto German: 10s each
Iron crosses: 6d a gross
Our specialty: bullets carefully fixed in bibles (for maiden aunts)

And Royal Pinolia Coy advertises products to preserve manly beauty such as “Our patent bomb-tongs... No more broken nails.”

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Today -100: February 25, 1918: They’ll keep doing it until they get it right

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Which seems to have been done by Lenin and Trotsky on their own authority, without the Central Executive voting on it.

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That’s J. Howard Shoemaker, the national amateur pocket billiards champion, not the King of the Shoemakers, as you may have first thought.

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Today -100: February 24, 1918: Peace?

Germany makes a new generous peace offer to Russia. Well, generous to themselves. Large sections of Russia (160,000 square miles, pop. 18 to 25 million) will no longer be Russia. The “fate” of those lands will be defined by Germany and Austria “in agreement with their populations.” The Russian army and navy to be completely demobilized. Russia has to make peace with Ukraine. Russian troops to leave Ukraine and Finland. Russia has to stop its revolutionary propaganda against Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria and their institutions. A 3 billion ruble indemnity. Russia has 48 hours to comply.

The NYT has an article about how former French prime minister Joseph Caillaux, currently in serious risk of being railroaded into prison, has been protected up until now by atheistic Masons.

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Today -100: February 23, 1918: The people’s terrorism must be opposed to the advancing enemy

Lenin calls on the Russian people to resist the German advance, since Germany seems to be disregarding their surrender. “The people’s terrorism must be opposed to the advancing enemy.” Everyone will be required to dig ditches – especially the bourgeois. However, the Bolsheviks (especially Trotsky) still seem to believe that German working-class soldiers won’t obey orders to march against their Russian brothers, which is just adorable. Lenin tells Bolsheviks that he can’t fight the Germans and counter-revolutionaries at the same time, and chooses the latter.

51 US military aviators have died in training or in “unauthorized flights” since June. Secretary of War Newton Baker says this is a small percentage of the men training, so it’s no big deal.

And Navy Sec Josephus Daniels wants Congress to abolish extra pay for naval aviators, which was put in place before the US entered the war because they couldn’t get life insurance, and now everyone in the military gets death benefits from the government, such as they are. Also, Daniels says, increased pay is no longer necessary to attract pilots because now you can just draft the poor sods.

South Dakota’s State Council of Defense orders all educational institutions in the state, including universities to stop teaching German. Later in the year, it will extend this to private schools, public gatherings, and churches.

Bridget Quinn of Conifer, Pennsylvania writes to Secretary of War Baker to offer her hair, and that of her little daughter, to be made into “rope of some kind” for the war. He says thanks but no thanks, as he’s already sold the war to buy her some fancy combs.

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Today -100: February 22, 1918: Of babbling masses of human protoplasm, incarnations of sentiments of order-loving peoples, franchises, and tiny negroes

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Taft says Russia is now “a babbling mass of human protoplasm.” Dude.

Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the commander of Austro-German forces on the Eastern front, tells his troops: “Russia is sick and is trying to contaminate all the countries in the world with a moral infection. We must fight against the disorder inoculated by Trotsky and defend outraged liberty. Germany is fortunate in being the incarnation of the sentiments of other order-loving peoples.”

The Prussian Diet’s Franchise Committee, which is supposed to be reforming Prussia’s retrograde 3-tier voting system, rejects equal suffrage in favor of giving some people extra votes based on guilds and professions, because it’s evidently still the 17th century.

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Today -100: February 21, 1918: Thinking men lose hope

Trotsky accepts Germany’s terms.

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To quote Thelma Ritter, that has everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.

Britain says it won’t recognize any peace deal made between Germany and Russia involving Poland without consultation with some actual Poles.

Austria, which has no such qualms, has either given the province of Cholm to Poland, or given it to Ukraine because of “race principles,” depending on which article in today’s paper you read. The Polish members of the Austrian parliament have been kicking up quite a fuss since the treaty with Ukraine was signed at Brest-Litovsk.

Evidently part of that peace deal required Ukraine to supply a certain amount of grain to the Central Powers or lose all the concessions made to it.

German Field Marshal August von Mackensen orders occupied Romania to form a new cabinet within 48 hours, including no member hostile to Germany or Austria. Pretty much every single Romanian is hostile to Germany and especially Austria, so this may be a little tricky.

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