Today -100: April 9, 1918: Of insurance agents, lynchings, and insane proposals

The Justice Dept claims that German agents, disguised as insurance agents, book agents, and phonograph salesmen, have been roaming Harlem trying to get blacks not to enlist in the army. They’ve arrested one such insurance collector, Max Freudenheim, who was telling people that after Germany wins the war it will create a great negro state “somewhere in the world.”

At the coroner’s inquest into the lynching of Robert Prager for making disloyal remarks, the Collinsville, Illinois mayor admits that he let the mob into the City Hall where Prager was being held, claiming he thought the police had already moved Prager elsewhere.

The Dublin city government warns the British government against trying to impose conscription in Ireland, calling it as “insane proposal” which would be violently resisted.

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Today -100: April 8, 1918: Every lover of freedom and of law must play his part

Gen. Pershing says “Every dollar subscribed to the Liberty Loan is a dollar invested in American manhood.”

NOTE: It was all I could do to stop myself entitling this post “Of German bondage and American manhood,” and it will receive a lot fewer Google hits as a result.

Lloyd George warns India about the German menace to Asia: “if we are to prevent the menace spreading to the east and gradually engulfing the world, every lover of freedom and of law must play his part.” Because nothing says freedom and law like the British Fucking Empire.

Japan says it is invading Vladivostok because a Japanese soldier was conveniently murdered and no one is maintaining law & order there. Despite all the talk recently about such a move, the actual landing seems to have taken the Entente (and the US) by surprise, evidently just ordered by an admiral on the scene. The Russians (when can I start calling them Soviets?) say it’s an invasion aimed at the Soviet Republic and anyway who knows who even killed that soldier.

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Today -100: April 7, 1918: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit

In Baltimore, Pres. Wilson gives a rousing speech opening the third Liberty Loan campaign as well as marking the anniversary of the US entry into the war. There’s a military parade. The NYT singles out the negro regiments, who “marched well.” Here’s the ending of Wilson’s speech: “Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”

Does anyone want to read a letter from a professor of biology at City College of NY entitled “How Vivisection Saves Soldiers”? Me neither.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Enlarging the page revealed that they improved form, not porn. I was wondering what the oarsmen did. Intertitle: “Hello, I’m Deke Everett Harumphington III from Princeton and this... is my oar.”

Another Smutty Headline of the Day -100: 

I don’t know what any of that means, but it all sounds unspeakably depraved.

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Today -100: April 6, 1918: If you are going to rob and strangle your neighbour it is better not to talk of your moderation

Wilson’s Cabinet discusses the lynching of Robert Prager in Illinois for allegedly making pro-German remarks. They decide (like the federal government always has re lynchings of blacks in the South) that the federal government can’t interfere, and anyway it’s Congress’s fault for not passing the pending bills against sedition fast enough.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Austrian Foreign Minister Count Czernin has gone public about Austria’s attempts last year to end the war. France & Britain have accused him of distorting his proposals and the seriousness of discussions. French PM Clemenceau, for example, says he only sent a rep to listen and not speak. British Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Lord Robert Cecil says “I prefer Prussian brutality to Austrian hypocrisy. If you are going to rob and strangle your neighbour it is better not to talk of your moderation.”

Worried about the dangers of bombardment of Paris by the German “super-gun,” the Paris police first ban matinee performances, then reverse themselves.

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Today -100: April 5, 1918: Of depressing sights, lynchings, liberty days, drills, and mass psychosis

Headline of the Day -100: 

Robert Prager, a German socialist, is lynched near Collinsville, Illinois for making disloyal remarks.

And in Athens, Illinois one John Rynders, who supposedly made pro-German remarks, is forced to kiss the flag, wear it around his neck, and swear allegiance. Also he will have to lead a Liberty Day parade, because irony.

I’m not sure I understand this “mob forces someone to swear allegiance” thing, but it’s becoming pretty common.

Male students aged 16 to 18 in New York state public schools will now be required to participate in military drills. Those who refuse will be expelled or not given diplomas.

A letter to the NYT from L. Pierce Clark, who is not identified in the paper but is presumably the shrink and plagiarist who in the 1920s will be president of the American Psychopathological Association and will write psycho-biographies of Napoleon and Lincoln, suggests that since it is “the popular belief that the German people are either suffering from a severe psychosis or they are racially defective,” these theories should be tested by studying captured German prisoners and figuring out how to reeducate the German people after the war to make them more “socially acceptable.” If they can’t be cured of Prussianism, they can be segregated from the rest of mankind.

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Today -100: April 4, 1918: We can henceforward regard the future with tranquillity

The Germans say their offensive has only slowed down because of bad weather.

Gen. Ferdinand Foch says “We can henceforward regard the future with tranquillity.” So that’s okay then.

Former President Taft says spies should be court-martialed and executed, “their citizenship ended by bullets.” But mob violence is wrong, he says. Don’t be like the lawless Germans, he says.

The French claim to have captured a German document ordering that soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine not be put on the front lines or given jobs that would allow them to gather intelligence for the French.

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Today -100: April 3, 1918: Remember that practically every pacifist is a suffragist

In a red-baiting election for Chicago aldermen, every Socialist candidate is beaten by “loyalists.”

The NY State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is changing its name to the Women Voters’ Anti-Suffrage Party to push for a new referendum to reverse the one that gave the vote to NY women last year. Outgoing president Mary Kilbreth reminds the annual meeting, “Remember that practically every pacifist is a suffragist.”

Sen. Charles Thomas (D-Colo.) claims that German spies working in a factory making gas masks sabotaged more than half of them. With little tiny holes. He blames immigrants who can’t speak English, who he wants banned from voting, and plotters speaking in foreign languages, which thwarts the Secret Service, whose members can’t be expected to be bilingual.

The Senate Judiciary Committee adopts an amendment to the Espionage Act making it illegal to make false statements with the intention of interfering with US military success or discourage the sale of Liberty Bonds or “wilfully cause or attempt to cause, or incite or attempt to incite, insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces” or obstruct military recruiting or say disloyal or seditious things about the government, Constitution, president or the flag or military uniforms or bring the government into disrepute or incite resistance to federal authority, or favor the cause of enemy nations, etc etc., subject to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The NYT totally supports this as “proportionate to the magnitude of the crime.” It would also like sabotage to be subject to the death penalty.

The Texas Legislature bans peace officers who earn less than $40 a month from carrying guns, presumably because they’ll be tempted to use those guns to supplement their income.

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Today -100: April 2, 1918: Of machine guns, sedition, and dressing for war and/or Easter

The Canadian army actually uses those machine guns against anti-conscriptionists in Quebec City. The article claims the trouble there is being fomented by Outside Agitators, possibly IWW, possibly with German money.

A Friedrich Pawlik of Hoboken, New Jersey is sentenced to 1 year for making seditious remarks about the president. Stanley Rapiz of Brooklyn is sentenced to 1 year for insulting the crew of a US transport. 112 IWW members go on trial in Chicago. 5 Indians and one Agnes Smedley are indicted for attempting to stir up rebellion against the British Raj. Which doesn’t really seem like the business of US courts. And:

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: April 1, 1918: Of the draft and wool grips

More anti-conscription rioting in Quebec. The army is bringing in machine guns.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Alien Property Custodian A. Mitchell Palmer plans to seize German-owned woolen mills in New Jersey.

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Today -100: March 31, 1918: Of hard-working burglars, daylight savings, and bilingualism

A “hard-working burglar, supporting a large family” writes to the Manhattan IRS collector saying he’d like to pay income taxes so the US can fight “the biggest burglar in the world – the Kaiser,” but he wants to know if his income tax return would be turned over to the cops. He evidently signed the letter, and Collector Eisner is pondering how to respond.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Because nothing says patriotism like a rally marking the introduction of daylight saving as the clock on the Metropolitan Tower is set forward at 2:00 a.m.

Kentucky Governor Augustus Owsley Stanley (D) vetoes a bill that would have banned the teaching of German in public schools.

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Today -100: March 30, 1918: Foched!

To coordinate the Allied response to the massive German offensive, the chief of the French General Staff, Gen. Ferdinand Foch, is put in charge of all allied forces on the western front, including American, Wilson having pushed for a unified command for some time. His new title is Généralissime, a title which is somehow much more impressive in Spanish than French.

The right-wing in the German Reichstag, getting cocky, are talking about demanding indemnities.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The German national is named Henry Fricker, the sailor A.M. Dengle, and if Fricker and Dengle doesn’t sound like a vaudeville act, I don’t know what does. Fricker is arrested for murder, but presumably not prosecuted since his name does not subsequently appear in the NYT index.

Anti-conscription riots in Quebec. The militia is called in.

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Today -100: March 29, 1918: Ah, probably fake German atrocity stories, how we’ve missed you

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100:

German Chancellor Georg von Hertling receives to a deputation from Lithuania asking for recognition of Lithuania as an independent state. He does so, except... in confederation with Germany. And Lithuania will be expected to help pay for Germany’s war.

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Today -100: March 28, 1918: Of planes, flags, and czars

George Creel’s Committee on Public Information has been telling newspapers that the US has shipped hundreds of warplanes to France when it has, in fact, shipped one warplane to France.

Mary Takeh of NYC, an Austrian national, is arrested for insulting an American flag. It started when she hung a German flag on her landing, to dry it after washing it, she said. The police confiscated it away and her neighbors told her to hang an American flag instead and then put one up. She took it down and threw it on the floor, at which point she was arrested and... sentenced to 6 months by a magistrate who says he’d have sentenced her to life if he could.

The Bolsheviks will move the ex-czar and his family to the Urals, presumably to prevent them being rescued by the anti-Bolshevik Whites.

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Today -100: March 27, 1918: Let George do it

Turkey thinks that if Germany gets the Baltics, it should have Crimea, because... self-determination?

Theodore Roosevelt accuses the Wilson Administration of having a “Let George do it” policy toward the war (i.e., letting the British do all the fighting).

The city of Chicago will revoke all 6,000 business licenses held by non-US citizens.

And the NY Legislature’s lower house passes a bill to ban all teachers who are either not US citizens or have not taken out first naturalization papers. Only the Socialists vote no.

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Today -100: March 26, 1918: Of crashing Christophers, muck, sex-ignorance, and wheat

For some reason the British are calling the shells hitting Paris from those far-off giant cannons “crashing Christophers.”

Karl Muck, the Boston Symphony’s conductor, is arrested as an enemy alien. The US is ignoring his Swiss citizenship and passport because he was born in Germany.

Marie Stopes’s book Married Love is published in Britain, providing information about sex and contraception. 37, Stopes is a geologist and paleobotanist (plant fossils). She is divorced, engaged to what will be her second husband, and a virgin. Her mother, also a university graduate and a feminist, didn’t clue her in before her wedding night. Some time later, wondering why she hadn’t gotten pregnant, Marie looked at some biology books in the secret section of the British Museum Reading Room which she only had access to because of her university degree, figured out what was going wrong and promptly, in 1916, got an annulment on the grounds of her husband’s impotence, presenting the court with a certificate from her doctor that her hymen had not been “penetrated by a normal male organ” (her ex, who was named Reginald Ruggles Gates, because of course he was, was not best pleased).  She writes in the preface, “In my first marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.” As in the US, people who published on the subject of birth control had been prosecuted for decades (and books like the 1915 edition of T.H. Huxley’s Human Physiology still left out the reproductive bits of human physiology), but Stopes was not (her writings were banned in the Irish Republic from 1930 until at least 1998). The title of the book is intended, like Margaret Sanger’s coinage of the term “family planning,” to distance contraception from notions of free love (and prostitution). Stopes went on to open birth control clinics all over Britain and snipe back and forth with the Catholic Church.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Not proto-hipsters being precious about gluten, but the Dodgers rejecting outfielder Zack Wheat’s salary demands.

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Today -100: March 25, 1918: When the European proletariat rises in revolt we shall say, We are here

The German offensive continues, Allies continue to pretend it’s no biggie.

What the NYT claims is the largest projector gas bombardment of the war is carried out by the Canadians, which doesn’t seem like a very Canadian thing to do.

Ingratitude of the Day -100:

Russian Military Chief Leon Trotsky calls for the creation of a new, large army to defend the Russian Revolution against European capital, and so that “when the European proletariat rises in revolt we shall say, ‘We are here.’”

Composer Claude Debussy dies.

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Today -100: March 24, 1918: Of big guns and Wobblies

The German drive is rolling along nicely, if you like that sort of thing, and they’ve literally brought the big guns in, hitting Paris every 15 minutes with shells fired from 60 or 70 miles away and arcing down from the stratosphere. No one knew they could do that. For a while it is assumed they must be being dropped from invisible airships, but fragments of the giant shells are found to have rifling on them, so... really big gun. The battle can be heard from London. Kaiser Wilhelm is on the scene, directing the offensive personally, or pretending to direct the offensive personally, as was the custom.

US District Court in Chicago denies the IWW’s request for the return of its seized papers. US District Attorney Charles Clyne tells the court the IWW is not a labor organization but a group of insanely embittered men preaching the gospel of unremitting hatred toward all employers, demanding, just like the Germans, that the world be delivered into their hands.

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Today -100: March 23, 1918: Of treaties, trenches, and tusks

The German Reichstag ratifies the Brest-Litovsk treaty, rejecting an Independent Socialist motion to stay the hell out of Finland.

The Liberty Loan Committee gets permission to dig trenches in Central Park as publicity for the next war loan, and New Yorkers are not happy. Really not happy. The plan will be dropped next week.

NYT Index Typo of the Day:

Turks, actually. The Turks have a battalion of women which they are trying to get all women aged 18-30 to join, but will keep them well away from the fighting.

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Today -100: March 22, 1918: Give me some blow and Cracker Jacks

The German offensive begins. This is the Last Big Push for Victory.

Headline of the Day -100: 

That is, the failure of a bill in the NY Legislature to legalize Sunday baseball games, NOT the introduction of Cocaine Day to make Sunday baseball games more bearable.

During a debate in the Senate on a bill to empower the government to take over timber operations, senators from the north-west demand the suppression of the IWW, which Sen. William King (D-Utah) says is being “coddled” by the federal government. 

A Pentecostal preacher, Rev. Clarence Waldron of Windsor, Vermont, is convicted for disloyal speech and advising draft resistance, and is sentenced to 15 years. In fact, the accusation may have been false, part of an attempt by parishioners to force him out of his Baptist church after his conversion to Pentecostalism. His sentence will be commuted in 1919.

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Today -100: March 21, 1918: Of seized ships and Fake News

Woodrow Wilson orders the seizure of all Dutch ships in US territorial waters, after failed negotiations in which neutral Netherlands tried to prevent its ships being used to carry troops and munitions, which its neighbor Germany would not be pleased about. Germany has threatened to retaliate by sinking ships bringing food to the Netherlands, but evidently Wilson considers a few starving Dutch people to be a price worth paying.

The editors of the German-language Philadelphia Tageblatt are on trial for presenting news in such a way as to favor Germany. The DA seems to be mostly quoting headlines. (The judge will direct a not guilty verdict because there was no “overt act.”)

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