Another edition of “Why Do We Need To Keep Saying This?”

Lots of people have rightly piled onto Ross Douthat for his recent column. But let’s boil it down, shall we? The desire of infertile couples for adorable white babies places absolutely no moral obligation on women with unwanted pregnancies to fill that need. None.

Today -100: January 5, 1911: Of large dirigibles, earthquakes, anarchist demonstrations, and college women

A dirigible capable of carrying 50 passengers is supposedly being built. Its designer promises it will neither explode nor fall.

An earthquake in Russia, 7.7 on the Richter scale, destroys Vyerny, the capital of Semiryetchensk.

Chicago bans anarchists holding a demonstration in honor of the Sidney Street burglars.

The endless discussion in the NYT letters pages about the women’s suffrage movement in colleges continues with a letter from “E.K.R.”, whose daughter is a student in a “prominent college.” She informs him that “without doubt most girls comes out of college suffragettes. ... I have three other daughters, and I am quite sure that no other girl of mine shall go to college to have this stuff ground into her head. It seems to me too bad that our girls should have their poor little heads filled up with this nonsense, thereby constantly increasing the already large army of spinster ladies in the United States of America; for what young man, except one of those long-haired poltroons, would marry a girl who is both a college graduate and a suffragette?”

Today -100: January 4, 1911: Of sieges, debt peonage, and run-over New Yorkers

The Siege of Sidney Street in London. Several weeks before, some Latvians who the press would make out to be anarchists trying to finance their hideous cause but were probably just small-time burglars were interrupted by police while tunneling into a jewelry store. They killed two cops (three?) and escaped, going to ground in a house in Stepney, where they were discovered three weeks later. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who naturally went along himself to observe the fun (a bullet passed through that nice top hat – questions about his recklessness were later raised in Parliament), sent in pretty much every cop in London to surround the house, plus Scots Guards from the Tower of London, who brought along a Maxim gun (which wasn’t used). A major gunfight ensued, lasting two hours, against what turned out to be just two people. The building was set on fire, Churchill refused to let the fire brigade put it out, and the two Latvians died, evidently at their own hands.



Click for the Manchester Guardian’s coverage.

Click for newsreel footage (3½ minutes):

LONDON - BATTLE OF LONDON - SIDNEY STREET SIEGE

The Supreme Court rules that Alabama’s labor contract law violates the 13th Amendment ban on slavery. The law prevented people who received pay in advance from quitting their jobs until it was repaid, and was used to reduce negroes to debt peonage.

Henry Cabot Lodge, although a three-term US Senator, is only now giving his first election speech, in advance of the Massachusetts state legislature’s vote on whether to give him a fourth term.

In 1910 376 people were killed by vehicular traffic in New York City, of whom 104 were killed by automobiles, 114 by or in trolleys, and 158 by horse-drawn vehicles. Part of the reason for the large number in the latter category is that while there is a stiff fine for drunk-driving an automobile it is not even illegal to drive a wagon drunk.

In 1910 there were roughly 500,000 automobiles in the US.

John Boehner, the man whose skin color has no rhyme

John Boehner still lacks a widely agreed upon nickname. He was called Boner by his oh-so-imaginative high school classmates, and lately I’ve been seeing Orange Julius. There’s The Great Pumpkin – I just had to google to see if I coined that one (evidently not) – Agent Orange, the Town Crier....

What else have you heard? What did Bush call him? Answers in comments, along with any suggestions of your own.

Today -100: January 3, 1911: Of coups, recovered heads, hands on ice, and umbrellas

Honduras’s deposed president (or coup leader, if you will) (1903-7) Manuel Bonilla re-enters the country and declares himself president again. The NYT notes that “There are disquieting rumors from Washington... that the State Department rather favors the revolutionists in Honduras.” State Department, United Fruit Company, no big diff.

An American military campaign in Mindanao (in the Philippines) against “bandits” ends. One private was killed and “The head of a soldier, which was held as a trophy by the bandits, was recovered.”

Headline of the Day -100: “Dead Hand out of the Ice.” A small boy finds an axe-murdered Italian in a frozen stream in New Jersey.

Oh, and the very next story: “Umbrella Stab to Brain.” Also in Jersey.

Today -100: January 2, 1911: Of revolutions and car accidents

If you’re wondering why I haven’t had much on the ongoing Mexican Revolution, a NYT editorial beginning “One who reads the newspapers with some care may note that there is ‘war’ in Mexico” goes some way towards explaining it. The Times says that the war, which “has the proportions of a riot,” may be confined to a small part of Chihuahua, although there may be uprisings elsewhere, “But of these disturbances we only get the vaguest reports”. Those reports insist that the Díaz government “is beaten daily if not hourly. One feels sorry for a Government that is so persistently beaten, and yet is unaware of its plight.” So the NYT has only crappy sources which it doesn’t trust and it doesn’t think that its job as a newspaper is to do anything about that.

In 1910, 76 children were killed by automobiles in New York City and 215 seriously injured. The National Highways Protective Society blamed 40% of these on the children and has begun an educational program in schools about not getting run over.

Oath

NYT: “To highlight his thrift, [Jerry] Brown, a Democrat, plans to stop at a cookout after he takes the oath to snack on hot dogs and chips.”

California has a very odd oath of office.

Today -100: January 1, 1911: What goes up must come down

Headline of the Day -100: “Moisant and Hoxsey Dare Winds and Die.” Aviator Archibald “Arch” Hoxsey (who took Teddy Roosevelt up in a plane in October) dies in a crash near LA blamed on “holes in the air,” which was evidently a problem in 1910. Earlier in the week he had set a new altitude record (11,474 feet). (Ralph Johnstone, another pilot who had a fatal crash in November, also did so just a few days after setting an altitude record. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.)

And in Louisiana, another famous aviator, John Moisant, was thrown from his plane, broke his neck and died.

32 people died in airplane crashes in 1910.

Haley and the kidney

Procrastination is good. I knew if I waited long enough, someone, in this case the AP, would write about the ethical implications of Haley Barbour pardoning the Scott sisters on the condition that Gladys give a kidney to Jamie. I’m so glad that Barbour has found a way of giving something to the black folks that won’t piss off his white racist base too much, and save the state hundreds of thousands in dialysis costs at the same time, but this is an ethical slippery slope. He can and should pardon them (16 years served so far for an $11 robbery!) so they can do the transplant, but making it a condition is a step too far, especially in a state that used to mass arrest black people on vagrancy and other flimsy charges and put them on chain gangs right before harvest season. We do not use our prisoners for spare parts.

Today -100: December 31, 1910: Of bathtub men

Headline of the Day -100: “Bathtub Men’s Plea for Clemency Fails.” This would be 14 corporations and 37 individuals comprising the Bathtub Trust, currently being prosecuted under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. The Justice Dept is going after them personally, seeking jail sentences.

Today -100: December 30, 1910: Of mercenaries, white-capping, and lepers in cars

There’s a revolution going on in Honduras, led by ousted President Gen. Manuel Bonilla and the improbably named Gen. Lee Christmas, an American mercenary. This “revolution” was financed by the United Fruit Company. The NYT thinks that a recent story of two Americans being whipped by the Honduran police is a plant.

80 prominent farmers in Corsicana, Texas are indicted for “white-capping” (basically KKK-type vigilante intimidation) aimed at driving negroes out of the county.

Two Headlines of the Day -100 today, both public transportation related. #1:“Lepers Ride in Cars.”
#2: “Dies in Sleeping Car.”

Today -100: December 29, 1910: Of amateur politicians, resurrections, and street cars

In a speech to the City Club of St Louis, NJ Governor-Elect Woodrow Wilson says that this is the day of the amateur politician, the politician not seeking personal gain. I wonder who he has in mind? He also said, “You can trust the people providing you serve them. Reveal everything and the people will be just; conceal anything and make them jealous.” “Force public officials to report often and watch their eyes to see if they are telling you all they know.”

Some Christian Scientists are protesting the placing of an armed guard at the cemetery where Mary Baker Eddy’s body is waiting to be interred, because they expect her to be resurrected.

There are riots and shooting in a border war between Chicago and its suburbs, whose residents are now being charged double fares to ride street cars into Chicago.

Today -100: December 28, 1910: Of men in small spaces

Cornelius Dayton, who went insane when serving in the Civil War, has been kept for the last 45 years in a cage on the family farm in Connecticut.

In West Virginia a lynching is thwarted when a negro prisoner was kept from the mob for several hours in the railroad station’s safe. He almost died of suffocation.

Okay, I thought I was done with Obama before. NOW I’m done with Obama.

Obama took time out of his presumably busy schedule to call the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles to thank him for hiring perpetrator of violence against animals Michael Vick.

Today -100: December 27, 1910: Of suffrage, interrupted toilets, pigs, mistletoe, and Sunday baseball

There have been several letters in the NYT over the last couple of weeks -100 about whether or not female students at Barnard College have any interest in women’s suffrage. Now an editorial informs us that “The organization of suffrage clubs in the women’s colleges is not spontaneous, the idea of it is hardly tolerated by the majority in the undergraduate bodies. The young women do not go to college to argue politics or to let the subject intrude upon their studies. It offends them. ... Outside the colleges the agitation of the suffragists has wrought no demonstrable good. It can do no good within them, and it has no rightful place within them.” So that settles that.

Headline of the Day -100: “Morok’s Aeroplane Interrupts Toilet.” Belgian aviator Charles Frank Morok set off from North Bergen, NJ, only to crash into the second floor of a house “where a young woman was completing her toilet at the time.”

On Christmas, there was an explosion at the Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles, part of an ongoing labor dispute. Now, 1,000 LA businessmen have formed a “vigilance committee” to beat up labor organizers, meet union agitators at the train station and turn them away, etc. A police captain says this is just what is needed.

The US sends a gunboat to Honduras. Just because.

Other Headline of the Day -100: “Won’t Let Woman Live with Pigs.” The Health Dept won’t let a woman back into her home in the, um, “Polackville” section of Queens.

Christmas-y Headline of the Day -100: “Mistletoe Kills Children.”

NY Governor-Elect Dix is such a politician: “I have never expressed myself on the subject of Sunday baseball.”

Today -100: December 26, 1910: Of common malefactors & robbers, strikes, and peacemaker’s heads

The governor of Chihuahua issues a proclamation calling for all citizens to organize themselves to fight the rebels and deriding the latter as common malefactors and robbers.

Employees of the Pressed Steel Car Company of Pittsburg are threatening to strike. 1909’s strike was accompanied by violence and this year plant workers have been buying rifles discarded by the Army. Oh, and they’re “foreigners.”

Christmas-y Headline of the Day -100: “Peacemaker’s Head Nearly Severed.” One Albert Hibbs in Camden, NJ, who tried to stop two negroes fighting (Hibbs’s race is not mentioned, which means he was white, since the 1910 NYT was incapable of referring to any African-American without making their race clear).

GOP gadgets

Republicans are proposing to allow members of Congress to bring their electronic gadgets into the House chamber – iPads, Blackberries, vibrators, etc. After all, Dick Cheney used to preside over the Senate, and he’s more machine than man.

CONTEST: What gadgets might be appropriate for Republican congresscritters in either House, collectively or for individuals, such as the iCurmudgeon, which reminds him what he’s cranky about on a real-time basis.

Today -100: December 25, 1910: Of hair, reckless driving, and dancing

One result of the Japanese annexation of Korea: human hair has gotten a lot cheaper on the world hair markets as Koreans are cutting off their top-knots. A ladies’ hairdresser tells the Times that “smart” women spend $100 to $150 a year on human hair, with $8 of foreign hair on her head at any one time. The glut of Korean hair will bring curls, switches (whatever those might be) etc within the reach of all.

A chauffeur (I think meaning taxi driver) in Nebraska is sentenced to 3 years for running over a rich guy (while driving some fares to a funeral). This is the first manslaughter conviction of a motorist in the West ever (reckless drivers in general seemed to get off pretty lightly in 1910).

Nebraska Governor-Elect Chester Aldrich will have no inaugural ball – he is a Methodist and “cannot countenance dancing.”

That voodoo that you do

1) Sarah Palin’s latest “cause” is Haiti (through the odious Franklin Graham’s group). 2) Haitians have been killing voodoo practitioners in an effort to end the cholera epidemic. Coincidence?

Today -100: December 24, 1910: Of gambling, divorces and recalls

Gamblers are demanding the repeal of an anti-gambling law recently passed in Nevada. They are threatening that if it is not repealed, they will repeal the other source of Nevada’s tourist trade, the divorce law.

A petition for the recall of Seattle Mayor Hiram Gill, elected earlier in the year, receives enough signatures to trigger a recall election, the first of an American mayor.