Today -100: August 27, 1918: Of speed-ups and whistling

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He could always run it at 24 frames per second.

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Today -100: August 26, 1918: A dog’s death for a dog

The federal District Court in NY rules that the Lusitania was an unarmed merchant ship with absolutely no explosives on board, so Germany’s torpedoing it was a violation of the rules of war and “an inexpressibly cowardly attack.” I don’t know if they actually believed that there were no explosives on board, which was not true and it wasn’t really a secret, but the court uses that finding to throw out the case of survivors against the Cunard Line.

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The Daily Mail (London) quotes an unnamed Russian prince who escaped Russia as saying that Tsarevitch Alexei was executed by Bolsheviks who told him “We killed your father – a dog’s death for a dog.” No explanation for how this alleged prince witnessed that and lived to tell the tale, but this is the first report that Alexei died of something other than “exposure.”

Dr. P. H. Howard of Cincinnati, investigating conditions in France on behalf of the Salvation Army, claims that the Germans crucified a US sergeant. He also rather gleefully describes a fight he saw in which “our boys” “knocked the hell out of” some Germans. “There isn’t enough of that picked Prussian Guard today to make a respectable link sausage for a cannibal”.

The Entente issues a statement in the bit of Russia they’ve invaded, denying Lenin’s branding of them as brigands. Rather, they say, they were invited by the “legitimate Government,” meaning the breakaway White “Government of the North,” with “the complete and unanimous agreement on the part of the population.” And they’re not here to interfere with the internal affairs of Russia, the statement says (after endorsing one self-proclaimed regime while declaring another illegitimate).

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Today -100: August 25, 1918: Herbert Hoover is already sweet enough

A Peruvian army garrison mutinies, demanding that Peru declare war on Germany.

The Senate releases to the public the evidence that led a sub-committee to condemn the Army aircraft program as inefficient, slow and wasteful, including closed-door testimony in which Secretary of War Newton Baker admitted having no idea if any US-made planes are actually being used in France (they aren’t).

German poison gas bombs are also really bad for linens, and the NYT is ON IT!

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The story’s not of particular interest, but I’ve been meaning to point out the increasing use of “Reds” as a way to describe the current government of Russia without according it any legitimacy.

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Today -100: August 24, 1918: Of criminal military systems, and u-boats

British Foreign Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil says Germany is totally unfit ever to have colonies, unlike, ahem. He also says a League of Nations can only succeed if there’s victory first and if Germany acknowledges “that her whole military system is criminal.”

The German gov is now permitting newspapers to stop claiming that there are only a few US soldiers in Europe. They’re offsetting this move towards honesty by exaggerating the extent of u-boat activity off the US’s eastern coast. Evidently the subs are totally ready to bombard every coastal city.

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Today -100: August 23, 1918: Always the last to know

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Three weeks ago, but the State Dept is only just finding out now.

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For instance, according to this story, Germans interrupted a movie to deport every male in the audience to Germany, claiming they were unemployed.

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Today -100: August 22, 1918: Good riddance to bad racist

Henry Ford says he will give back all the profits which he personally makes from war contracts.

Lenin tells the pope he can’t let the Romanovs out of the country like the pope asked, because Moscow is out of communications with the place where they are now. Which is hell. Because they’re dead. But he doesn’t tell the pope that.

Sen. James Vardaman loses the primary for re-election. The  NYT rejoices in the Mississippi Dems’ rejection of the “duper and idol of the ‘hillbillies,’ the astute player on ignorance, passion, and ‘poor white’ prejudice, the ‘White Chief,’ the upholder of the ‘White South’...”, the “egoist-pacifist” who opposed US entry into World War I, which for the Times is a much bigger crime than his long-time support for lynching and the disenfranchisement of black people. The former governor will not hold office again. The University of Miss. announced in 2017 that it would change the name of Vardaman Hall but doesn’t seem to have actually done it. Mississippi also has a town called Vardaman, the “sweet potato capital of the world.”

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Today -100: August 21, 1918: But how about three tons of eloquence?

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau thinks the war will be over by the end of 1919.

Gabriele d'Annunzio declines to attend a celebration in Rome of his pamphlet air-drop on Vienna. “Three tons of explosives dropped on the enemy are more effective than three ounces of eloquence.”

23 suffragists imprisoned after protesting across from the White House are released after a 6-day hunger strike. They were in for the crime of holding a demonstration without a permit. Their release and the fact that tomorrow they will be issued a permit for their next demo strongly suggest that the Wilson Administration is worried about the optics internationally of imprisoning people demanding the vote.

Some fishermen whose boats were destroyed by u-boats near Nantucket say they chatted with a German officer who boarded their ship, I guess before sinking it, and he showed them a Broadway theater ticket stub from 2 days before because u-boat crews totally went on leave in Manhattan like all the time, that was just one of the perks.

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Today -100: August 20, 1918: Of waning red power, cheap drugs, u-boat dangers, and Hinky Dinky Parley Voo

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Two “German agents” are arrested for selling drugs “at surprisingly low prices” to soldiers in an obvious plot to “debauch” them.

Woodrow Wilson has been on vacation in Manchester, Massachusetts, with the sea and the golf and whatnot. He’s been guarded by torpedo boats and submarine chasers just in case a u-boat tries to assassinate him, which is totally a thing that could really happen.

Gen. Pershing orders soldiers not to fuck French prostitutes. (Spoiler Alert: American soldiers will totally fuck French prostitutes.)

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Today -100: August 19, 1918: Of premature obituaries, influenza, race riots, newspaper boycotts, and barrymores

The NYT reports on the assassination (no details beyond that one word are provided) in Petrograd of Jewish lawyer and advocate of the rights of Russian Jews Henri Sliosberg. In 1902 he was asked by Foreign Minister Count Witte if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was real. He said no. Anyway, he’s not really dead so here’s another NYT obituary of him, from 1937.

NY Port health officers will start checking incoming ships for cases of Spanish flu, but won’t quarantine ships with just “a few cases.”

2 black soldiers are killed during a “race riot” at Camp Merritt in New Jersey. The cause is unknown at this time. Will the NYT investigate? What do you think?

Kaiser Wilhelm says the Allied bombing of Frankfort violates international law.

80 Brooklyn newsdealers decide to stop selling Hearst newspapers and magazines, although this is supposedly not for political reasons (as it definitely is in Mt Vernon and other cities) but because Hearst agents have been pressuring them to take more papers than they want and if they don’t, stand near the offending newsstand selling papers. Alternately, the dealers might be trying to use Hearst’s present unpopularity to force a reduction in the wholesale price they pay.

Now Playing: Our Mrs. McChesney, starring Ethel Barrymore. The NYT is not impressed: “what one sees of her at the Strand is simply what is left after she is deprived of all of her voice, most of her personality, and much of her art.” And now even that is gone; it’s a lost film. Sigh.

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Today -100: August 18, 1918: Boy, that Entente, quite an imagination, huh?

A Chicago jury convicts 100 members of the IWW for hindering the war effort and violating the Espionage Act. Every single defendant. Which suggests they didn’t put a lot of thought into working out who did what. That and the fact that they deliberated for an hour after a complex 4+-month trial.

Austria denounces the British recognition of Czechoslovakia, saying that the Czech National Council “is a committee of private persons who have no mandate from the Czechoslovak people and still less from the Czechoslovak ‘nation,’ which exists only in the imagination of the Entente.”

Poet Joyce Kilmer is killed in the Second Battle of Marne, at 31. The trees are in mourning.

A ship arrives in New York, this time from the Netherlands, after a voyage in which 200 passengers got sick with the Spanish flu and 5 died, all of the latter East Indians, which I take to mean Indonesians. The dead were buried at sea.

The Germans have adopted parachutes for their planes.

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Today -100: August 17, 1918: Blanked in Boston

No aliens will be allowed to leave the US without permission from September 15.

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Today -100: August 16, 1918: Of quarantines, diaries, and dicks

US troops arrive at Vladivostok.

Dr. Leland Cofer, health officer for the Port of New York, says there is no need to establish a quarantine for the Spanish flu or other “minor communicable diseases,” and anyway that would just clog up the workings of the port and there’s a war on, you know.

Another passenger from the Norwegian ship dies.

The Soviets have started publishing excerpts from dead former Czar Nicholas’s diaries. He ascribed the February Revolution to “treason and cowardice.”

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Today -100: August 15, 1918: No need for our people to worry over the matter

Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo calls for an 80% tax on war profits to raise the revenues needed to fight the war in 1919.

Port health officers now admit that that Norwegian ship’s passengers did have influenza, but President of the NYC Board of Health Royal S. Copeland, doing his best Mayor-Vaughan-refusing-to-close-Amity-beaches imitation, says there’s not the slightest chance of a Spanish flu epidemic in New York. Only malnourished people like German soldiers get it, so “No need for our people to worry over the matter.” So that’s okay then.

Copeland, by the way, is a homeopathist.

The War and Navy Offices’ commissions on training camps issues a warning asking girls not to talk with men in uniform unless they’ve been formally introduced.

Germany supposedly demands that Finland send troops into Murmansk within 2 weeks, or else.

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Today -100: August 14, 1918: Of triumvirates, flu, and Czechoslovakias

The Second Soviet Congress names Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev a triumvirate with sole executive power during the present emergency.

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A Norwegian ship arrives after a voyage in which pretty much everyone got sick, 4 died, 1 died after docking, and 9 are still quite sick. Doctors claim it isn’t Spanish flu, it’s pneumonia, and didn’t quarantine the sick. Did they not know that severe influenza leads to pneumonia? I guess not.

The article explains that “flue” is the British abbreviation of influenza. 

Britain formally recognizes Czechoslovakia as a nation and more importantly as a nation with an army. France and Italy have already recognized it, the US has not.

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Today -100: August 13, 1918: Of mustard gas, assassinations, raincoats and pamphlets

The US Navy claims that a German u-boat launched a mustard gas attack on a North Carolina lighthouse. The crew of the lighthouse all survived but some chickens died. This all seems unlikely (u-boats are operating in that area, though).

The Germans in Ukraine publicly hang Boris Donskoy of the Left Social Revolutionaries for assassinating Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn with a bomb in Kiev.

Berlin papers claim that the Bolshevik government is preparing to flee Moscow for Kronstadt and that Lenin & Trotsky have already done so.

US Ambassador to Russia David Francis (well, the NYT calls him ambassador but the US doesn’t recognize the Bolshevik government so he’s not actually an ambassador any more) and the other Allied ambassadors refuse the Bolsheviks’ demand that they move to Moscow. Francis is going instead to Archangel.

Prussia bans the entry into Germany of Jewish workers from the East.

Corporations and people involved in making shoddy raincoats for US troops are indicted under the Sabotage Act.

Viennese authorities order the populace to turn in all the pamphlets dropped by d'Annunzio et al, or else.

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Today -100: August 12, 1918: Of refuges, tsarinas, and intolerable distractions

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The pope is urging Russia to free the (dead) former Tsarina Alexandra and her (dead) daughters.

The Women Voters' Anti-Suffrage Party of NY writes Pres. Wilson to complain about his switch from opposition to support of a federal women’s suffrage Amendment, which they call an “intolerable distraction.” They point out that the last 10 times states have held referenda on the subject, women’s suffrage won over (all-male) electorates only once, in “the Socialist-pacifist triumph in New York State.” They deny that a federal amendment is “a measure of democracy” or a war measure. Indeed, the fighting strength of countries like Russia is undermined by socialism and women’s suffrage is part of that, somehow.

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Today -100: August 11, 1918: Of pushes, inventions, and illusions

The Allies continue to push the Germans back quite successfully. The Germans blame fog.

The British Munitions Ministry has been receiving helpful advice from the public, such as: freeze the clouds and mount artillery on them, train cormorants to pick apart the mortar on the Krupp’s weapons factories, use giant magnets mounted on balloons to grab German rifles, mount scythes on planes as protection, set Zeppelins on fire with heat rays, capture German soldiers with cement... And, of course, snake catapults.

The Sunday NYT Book Review section reviews Sigmund Freud’s Reflections on War and Death, a translation of a 1915 book in which he explains how the war stripped people of their illusions that humans never die, or something.

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Today -100: August 10, 1918: We didn't come except for the joy of the daring

Italian poet/playwright/proto-fascist/pilot Capt. Gabriele d'Annunzio leads 9 planes (8?) on a 700-mile mission to drop 50,000 pamphlets on Vienna, which he wrote himself but didn’t bother to get translated. In them he informs the Viennese, “On this August morning, while the fourth year of your desperate convulsion comes to an end and luminously begins the year of our full power, suddenly there appears the three-color wing as an indication of the destiny that is turning. ... On the wind of victory that rises from freedom's rivers, we didn't come except for the joy of the daring, we didn't come except to prove what we could venture and do whenever we want, in an hour of our choice.” In other words, we can bomb Vienna if we want to.

R. H. Bruce Lockhart, acting consul general in Moscow, and members of his staff are arrested by the Soviet authorities. The British claim it is in reprisal for the landing at Archangel. In fact, Lockhart and Sidney “Ace of Spies” Reilly (not arrested) had been plotting a coup against the Soviet regime and the assassination of Lenin.

The British at Archangel, Murmansk and Vladivostok put out a declaration that the Allies have only invaded “as friends to help you save yourselves from dismemberment and destruction at the hands of Germany” and they don’t intend to impose a government on Russia (hah!). “Our one desire is to see Russia strong and free, and then to retire to watch the Russian people work out their own destinies.”

The US Food Administration lifts restrictions on beef consumption, including rationing to households and limits in restaurants.

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Today -100: August 9, 1918: Of wars, governments of norths, women MPs or not, and old old old soldiers

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda, Fake News and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: A German paper says Russia has declared war on England. Which isn’t precisely true but will lead to a particularly snotty NYT editorial tomorrow.

A “Government of the North” is formed by the Whites in Archangel. Very Game-of-Thronesey.

Britain’s law officers rule that women can’t be elected to Parliament.

Speaker of the House Champ Clark says if he had his druthers the draft age would be raised to 68 (his age) and he’d go to France and serve under his son.

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Today -100: August 8, 1918: Of suffragists, trying to get my stupid word processor to show ă’s, and arch zeppelin raiders

The NYT suggests that suffragist protesters shouldn’t be sent to the workhouse, where they just disrupt discipline, but to the psychiatrist, presumably for committal.

The Romanian parliament votes unanimously to prosecute Ion Brătianu, who was prime minister from 1914 until January of this year, and four members of his cabinet, for bringing Romania into the war.

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Führer der Luftschiffe (or, to translate his title into Steampunk, Arch Zeppelin Raider) Peter Strasser is shot down in what will turn out to be the last zeppelin raid on Britain of the war.

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