Today -100: April 3, 1914: Of thwarted sprots, home rule all round, fannies, and Torreón falls

“General” Kelley of the unemployed army is convicted of vagrancy in Sacramento. His army marches on.

The Tories decide to let Asquith run unopposed in the by-election. Col. Sprot must await another opportunity (spoiler alert: Col. Sprot will actually defeat Asquith in the 1920 general election, and then go on to accomplish... well, that’s it, that’s all he ever accomplished).

Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey has suggested a federal system as a way out of the Home Rule/Ulster impasse. Everybody’s being very polite about it, although I fail to see how that would resolve the fundamental question of whether Ireland should be a single political unit.

Rumors correctly say that a major shipment of rifles bought in the US will be smuggled into Northern Ireland aboard the S.S. ... wait for it... the S.S. Fanny. More will be heard of the Fanny. And a certain amount of shameless giggling.

Suffragettes burn Lisburn Castle in County Antrim, although the fire is put out before doing much damage. Sir Edward Carson is now on the WSPU’s shit list for not including women’s suffrage in his demand for a referendum on Ulster exclusion from Home Rule.

The Treasury Department names the 12 cities in which Federal Reserve banks will be created. There was a lot of haggling over this.

Russia makes it legal for married women to own property, open businesses, get jobs and apply for their own passport without their husband’s permission. Legal separation, short of divorce, is introduced.

Mexico: The rebels take Torreón, but Gen. Velasco escapes.

Constitutionalist authorities in Parral arrest the US consular agent for passing counterfeit money (counterfeits of rebel money, not federal money or “Villa currency”).

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Robust exercise

Roberts, in his McCutcheon opinion: “To require one person to contribute at lower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causes is to penalize that individual for ‘robustly exercis[ing]’ his First Amendment rights.” Or in other words:


(click to enlarge)

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Today -100: April 2, 1914: Of policewomen, wotherspoons, aggressive women, rubbers & hinky dinks, and pure shoes

Pittsburgh gets its first policewomen, four of them. They will look after young girls arriving in the city and investigate liquor law violations in establishments where women are served and go undercover in skimpy clothes, although I may be thinking of Angie Dickinson there.

(Alliterative) Name of the Day -100: newly appointed US Army chief of staff W.W. Wotherspoon.

Lord Cromer, who used to run Egypt for Britain and is a leading anti-suffragist, says hunger-strikers should be allowed to die. He also says that the women’s suffrage movement is doing great harm by making men less courteous to women and women more “aggressive” toward men.

Headline of the Day -100: “‘Bath House John’ Target for Woman.” Marion Drake is running for alderman in Chicago’s First Ward, long the fiefdom of men who glory in the names “Bath House” John Coughlin (who rose from the humble status of a “rubber” in a bath house, which evidently means a masseur) and “Hinky Dink” McKenna, who I assume acquired his sobriquet by having a dink that was particularly hinky.

Roald Amundsen postpones his Arctic expedition until 1915.

The Macon Telegraph defends the wrongful conviction of Leo Frank for murder and attacks the campaign to secure a new trial for him by saying that whatever becomes of him “is of little consequence when compared to the effect which the recent crusade against the courts will have upon them. If a mistake is made involving a single human life it would be deplorable, but it is better that such a mistake should be made than that our legal system should be brought into disrepute. The courts of law are the only protection which the citizen – high or humble – has. If he cannot appeal to them with the assurance that justice will be done, that his rights will be guarded, and that his life and property will be protected, then our system of government is on the ragged edge.” And if that’s not a good reason to execute a demonstrably innocent person, I don’t know what is.

A shoe company sues to prevent enforcement of Kansas’s pure shoe law. Pure shoes, it turns out, are 100% leather. Shoes using substitutes must be labeled.

Alec Guinness is born.

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Today -100: April 1, 1914: Ask not for whom the canal tolls...

The bill repealing the exemption of American ships traveling between the coasts from Panama Canal tolls passes the House 247-162. Speaker “Champ” Clark (D-Missouri) gives a speech denying that his opposition to the bill has anything to do with planning to run against Wilson in 1916. He says “I can be happy without the presidency,” which (spoiler alert) is just as well. Incidentally, the 1912 Democratic platform opposed removing the exemption, but D’s voting for doing so cite another plank against subsidizing businesses, and so have been calling the toll exemption a “ship subsidy.”

A particularly popular sentence in Champ Clark’s speech: “I’d rather see the canal walled up than give the English any control of it.”

The Mexican rebels have been issuing not one but two currencies to compete with the federal government’s. Carranza hq now bans “Villa currency,” which has proven to be easy to counterfeit.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Lynched With Knives.” In Santa Fe, Adolfo Padilla, accused of cutting his wife’s throat, is dragged out of jail by masked men who stab him to death.

A black woman, Marie Scott, is lynched in Muskogee, OK. She had stabbed a white man who’d been fresh with her in the negro section of Wagoner.

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Today -100: March 31, 1914: Asquith has run away

Sir John French, head of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir John Ewart, adjutant general to the Armed Forces, stick to their resignations. Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely again offers his resignation, and this time it’s accepted. Prime Minister Asquith will take over that job as well. Which means (as it meant before World War I) that he is required to resign his parliamentary seat and run again in a by-election, while continuing as prime minister. His opponent, unless the other parties decide to let him run unopposed, will be a Tory who is named Col. Sprot, because of course he is. Asquith’s absence from Parliament will conveniently make it unable to question him for a couple of weeks, including the period in which the Home Rule Bill is debated. “Premier Asquith has run away,” the Daily Mail says.

Count Zeppelin invents a soundless airship for the German military.

Stories from the siege of Torreón from war correspondent John Reed, as played by Warren Beatty: Federal commander Velasco going insane and having to be put under restraint. Pancho Villa personally throwing hand grenades.

The debate in Congress on repealing the exemption from Panama Canal tolls for US ships traveling between the East and West coasts of the US has been contentious. Woodrow Wilson is angry that he’s been accused of doing a secret deal with Britain on this.

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Today -100: March 30, 1914: Of vice wars, censorship, espionage, plumes, currencies, traffic cops, and wild ballets

Vice Headline of the Day -100: “Vice War in Alton Menaces Churches.” In a little local dispute over prohibition, the Alton, Illinois YMCA, where dry meetings were held, is burned down, along with an alderman’s grocery store.

All the newspapers in Mexico City wrongly reported that the Constitutionalists were defeated at Torreón except one, El País. In other news, El País has been closed by the government. In other news, no one in Mexico City actually knows what is going on in Torreón.

A Russian inventor and telegraph engineer named Jhidkovsky is arrested for intercepting wireless messages from the War Office in St Petersburg and selling them to an (unnamed) foreign government.

Plume Headline of the Day -100: “French Officers May Wear Plumes.” The US ban on the importation of plumage will not apply to the humorous hats worn by officers assigned to French missions in the US.

There are now two currencies circulating in Mexico, issued by the two rival governments, neither of them backed by much of anything and both rapidly declining in value.

There is talk among the rebels of splitting the north of Mexico into a separate country.

A bill before the NY Legislature would increase the number of traffic cops in NYC to 1,000, nearly doubling the number of men directing traffic. A recent law made it a crime to disobey the orders of a traffic cop.

Proquest L.A. Times Headline Typo of the Day -100: “SHOOTS AT ZELAYA.: Revengeful Nicaraguan Tries to Kill Former President in Spain. But Ballet Goes Wild.”

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Today -100: March 29, 1914: Of new countries, street cars, hissing, feudists, and the paraphernalia and pretensions of war

Baja California has evidently seceded from Mexico.

Headline of the Day -100: “3-Cent Fare Riots Averted.” A Toledo, Ohio ordinance requiring that street car fares not exceed 3¢ went into effect at midnight. The car company is fighting this and there were worries that the militia would have to be called in to restore order if increased fares provoked riots. Instead, the company is only accepting the old higher fares (which I think were 5¢); if people offer the legally mandated 3¢, they are allowed to ride free (something about not establishing a legal precedent by accepting the 3¢ fare). So no rioting today.

A Dublin magistrate reaffirms that there is a Common Law right to hiss a play.

Orville Wright says current airplanes can’t make trans-Atlantic flights.

The Danish Senate unexpectedly rejects the Danish-American arbitration treaty. It’s not clear why.

Thomas Edison’s film studio in the Bronx burns down. A lot of films, sets, costumes, and cylinders intended to serve as the soundtrack for films, are destroyed.

Obituary of the Day -100: Randall McCoy, or as the NYT terms him, “Randall McCoy, Feudist”. Of Hatfields & McCoys feud fame, patriarch of the McCoys, he dies at 88, so I guess he wins.

H.H. Munro (Saki) has published “When William Came,” a sci-fi book about England under German occupation (this is the US edition; the British one was last year). Bands playing “Germania Rules the Waves,” that sort of thing.

And H.G. Wells has published “The World Set Free,” which suggests the coming of something resembling nuclear bombs and warns of the growing destructiveness that technology had brought to the world, and the failure of social and governmental structures to keep pace:

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, ‘fooled around’ with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

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Today -100: March 28, 1914: I don’t know of any assembly on the part of the working people that would be lawful

Oregon Gov. Oswald West is still on his anti-saloon tear. He warns Salem’s Mayor Hilda Larson that if she doesn’t stop violations of liquor laws in Salem he will close all the saloons. She had actually requested the DA investigate the sale of liquor to minors – in saloons competing with her husband’s. Instead, he has been arrested for the sale of liquor to minors; spite work by the other saloon-keepers, Mayor Larson says.

Frank Tannenbaum, the IWW leader who led the raid of the unemployed on NYC churches, is convicted for “participating in an unlawful assemblage.” He told the court, “I don’t know of any assembly on the part of the working people that would be lawful.” The judge informs him that the United States is “the best place in the world for every man who has industry” and accuses him of failing to appreciate the spirit of American institutions before sentencing him to a year in an American institution and a $500 fine, which should be a spur to industry.

Ironic-in-Hindsight Headline of the Day -100: “Lusitania Brings Shipwrecked Men.”

The NYT editorializes that Canada has the right idea in sending a United Mine Workers organizer to prison for 4 years for his part in riots associated with the coal strike in Nanaime, and giving shorter sentences to 50 more strikers. The Times seems to think that the law in the US is entirely on the side of strikers which... I can’t... even....

Headline of the Day -100: “FLIES 2 MILES UPSIDE DOWN; Huck Performs Remarkable Feat at Northampton Aviation Field.” One assumes on purpose.

The king of Italy wrote a four-volume book on coins.

Russia will ban the export of horses in order to keep the army’s equine bills down.

The New York Legislature finishes up its session in a frenzy of legislatin’. It passes bills to restrict the sale of heroin and to carry out executions only in one prison, Sing Sing. A bill for widows’ pensions passed the Assembly 100-2 but was blocked in the Senate. The Assembly fails to pay the enormous expenses spent so far in trying to extradite escaped insane murderer Harry Thaw from New Hampshire (and from Canada before that).

The British Army issues a new order that officers and soldiers may not be asked what they would do in hypothetical contingencies such as enforcing Home Rule, that officers and soldiers may not ask for assurances about future orders, and that it is the duty of officers and soldiers to obey every lawful command. Prior to this month, you wouldn’t have thought any of that needed saying.

Suffragettes are believed to have burned down the Belfast Lough country residence of retired Maj. Gen. Sir Hugh McCalmont, whose grounds have been used by Ulster Unionists to practice military drills.

A bunch of NY Gov. Glynn’s appointees are confirmed by the Legislature. Having learned the lesson of his predecessor’s impeachment, his nominees were all good Tammany men.

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Today -100: March 27, 1914: Eat faster!

The Massachusetts Legislature votes to hold a referendum on women’s suffrage, although it will take another vote in the Lege in 1915 first.

This week the Women’s Freedom League picketed Scotland Yard to protest its continued employment of constables who knew about the sexual relations between another constable and a 14-year-old girl.

The Women’s Social and Political Union announces that in the fiscal year ending February 28, its income was £36,896, an increase of £8,000 over the previous year. Militancy pays.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “‘Eat Faster,’ Kaiser Rules.” Kaiser Wilhelm reforms dinner: fashionable dinners must now last no more than 45 minutes, and women will no longer leave men to their cigars and dirty stories after dinner, but will remain and socialize with them.

The kaiser refuses the crown prince permission to go on a trip to Africa. But is it for financial reasons, or because he realized it was less about visiting the German colonies for the prince than hunting, or “owing to recent events, of which the public are not informed”? Berlin is abuzz.

The chief of the British Army General Staff, Brig. Gen. Sir John French, and Adjutant Gen. Sir John Spencer Ewart resign over their part in acquiescing to the Curragh mutineers. They signed the written assurance that the military wouldn’t be used against Ulster, and view the Cabinet’s retraction of that unauthorized assurance as a personal slight. They say they’ll stay if Minister of War Seely is fired. So the response to a crisis about members of the military dictating to the government is to do it again.

Reports from the rebel attack on Torreón are contradictory and untrustworthy, as was the custom, but it seems the Federales have driven off the rebels through superior artillery.

Havana establishes a quarantine after cases of bubonic plague show up.

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Today -100: March 26, 1914: I repudiate the hellish suggestion!

Parliament is told that when Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely gave Brig. Gen. Gough those written assurances that the government wouldn’t use the military to “crush political opposition” to Home Rule, he did so without consulting the Cabinet, which has now rescinded the guarantee. And asked for it to be returned. Evidently the 37th Cavalry doesn’t get a veto over government policy after all. Seely has offered his resignation, but it hasn’t been accepted (yet). Probably just as well for Britain this clown wasn’t in that post when there was an actual war to minister.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill tells Parliament that he did indeed order a battle squadron to Ireland, just in case, but when the army maneuvers went off without fighting he’d decided to delay. Does that mean, a Tory MP asks, that he expected the maneuvers to lead to fighting? “I repudiate the hellish suggestion!” Winston thunders, as was the custom. He explains the order to embark field guns by saying it was just for exercise in case of rain. Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law pretends to believe that the whole thing was a plot to provoke an uprising in Ulster in order to crush it, a plot which was thwarted only by the convictions of the Army that, in the matter of Home Rule, the British government was as much a revolutionary committee as Huerta’s regime in Mexico and its orders could therefore be legitimately resisted.

The Assize Court rules that the British government can’t ban the importation of arms into Ireland.

Har Dayal, a former lecturer in Indian philosophy at Stanford Universtiy, is arrested ostensibly as an illegal alien, but actually because of his anarchist beliefs and because the British would like to get their hands on him. The position of the commissioner-general of immigration is that all Hindus like Dayal are unassimilable and liable to become a public charge, even if they’re rich like Dayal, who taught for free at Stanford. Dayal will flee to Europe.

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Today -100: March 25, 1914: Of volcanos, planning meals in Torreón, cheers against kings, and the double standard

In Naples, panic ensues after some guy says he saw the giant statue of St. Januarius, patron saint of the city, change position and turn its back on Mount Vesuvius. An eruption is therefore imminent, according to idiots.

The Constitutionalists are besieging Torreón and have captured parts of it. Pancho Villa sends a message to the Federal general, asking him to breakfast tomorrow in the town, presumably left-overs from the dinner he boasted he’d be eating in Torreón three days ago. Villa is departing from his usual practice of killing wounded enemy soldiers.

At Henriette Caillaux’s preliminary hearing, she says that she shot Calmette because she was afraid her husband, who is a good shot, would kill him and go to jail. She bought a gun for the first time that morning (and practiced in the gunseller’s basement shooting range) and shot low, she says, just to scare Calmette, somehow hitting him four times. She talks about her “anguish” and “delirium” a lot, which is setting the stage for a crime-of-passion defense, which usually works, at least in Paris and for female murderers.

Other prisoners at Saint Lazare women’s penitentiary (staffed entirely by nuns, I believe) are complaining about the privileges Madame Caillaux’s getting (wearing her own clothes, catered food, a second cell for use as a reception room, etc), and got put in solitary in retaliation.

Gen. Sir Hubert Gough returns to Northern Ireland in triumph, telling the officers of the Third Cavalry Brigade that he has a guarantee – a written guarantee yet – that they will not be used to enforce Home Rule in NI.

Headline of the Day -100 (Daily Telegraph): “Cheers Against the King.” During the House of Commons discussion of the Curragh Mutiny, John Ward (Lib) says that Parliament must decide whether it will make the laws without interference from the king or the army. He paused after “king,” and there was a loud cheering from Irish Nationalist, Labour, and some Liberal MPs, indicating their displeasure with what they (correctly) believe was behind-the-scenes royal interference in the Home Rule Bill, which forced Asquith to allow Ulster that six-year opt-out. The NYT says of the cheering, “Parliament had not witnessed such an obviously hostile criticism of the Throne in the memory of the oldest member”.

Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond says “The Ulster Orange plot has been revealed.” The volunteer army of Loyalists never intended to fight, he says: “The plan was to put up the appearance of a fight, and then, by society influence, seduce the officers of the British army. By this means they intended to intimidate the government and to defeat the will of the British people.”

The London Times editorializes that it is a great mistake to pass laws which people will not obey; it brings all law into contempt. Votes for Women will point out that this is a “frank defence of law-breaking,” which applies as much to militant suffragist methods as to those of Ulster men. Similarly, Lloyd George asks in Parliament what moral right Bonar Law would have, if the Tories took power, to punish suffragettes. And The Suffragette says that if the army is allowed to decide not to move against Unionists, then police, wardresses, and prison doctors can refuse to coerce suffragettes.

A National Organization of Women Suffrage Societies of Canada is formed, bringing together the various provincial groups.

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Today -100: March 24, 1914: Of the cavalry, the coercion of Ulster, superdreadnoughts, scabs, and Latin

US cavalry and Mexican troops have a brief firefight at the border. The Federales were shooting at a smaller contingent of Constitutionalists who were fleeing into the US, and then at the Americans who met the rebels. When the federals hit some horses, the cavalry fired back.

Brig-Gen Sir Hubert Gough, one of the British soldiers at Curragh who said he’d resign rather than fight against Ulster, is reinstated without having to take back that position. Some of this is just different people in the government working at cross-purposes, and some of them *cough* Secretary of State for War J.E.B. Seely *cough* Irish commander-in-chief Sir Arthur Paget *cough* are just terrible at their jobs, but the Tory press is crowing because it looks very much as if the rebellious soldiers have extracted a promise from the government that the military wouldn’t be used to enforce government policy, Home Rule, in the north of Ireland against rebellious resistance. PM Asquith explains to Parliament that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. Tory leader Bonar Law says that “the coercion of Ulster is an operation no Government has the right to ask the army to undertake, and in our view an officer who refuses is only fulfilling his duty.” Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald points out that the army hasn’t resisted past orders to shoot down strikers (and Tom Mann went to jail for asking soldiers not to do so).

The US Supreme Court upholds a Massachusetts law limiting minors and women in manufacturing jobs to 10 hours a day, 56 hours a week (since amended to 54).

The US Navy launches its largest “superdreadnought,” the Oklahoma.

Mother Jones goes to the strike zone in Colorado and is rearrested, as was the custom.

Strikers get into a heated gun battle with special deputies protecting scabs at the Gould Coupler Company in Depew, NY. The strikers attack a train bringing scabs into the plant with stones and bullets. Early in the strike, which began three months ago, the company declared the town of Depew hostile and that it would employ no locals, so special trains have been bringing in scabs from Buffalo every day.

The Japanese cabinet resigns over a scandal involving Navy contracts.

Obit of the Day -100: Harry Thurston Peck, L.H.D., PhD, LL D, former professor of Latin at Columbia and author of numerous scholarly books. Fired by Columbia after being sued by his former secretary for breach of promise (he had a pretty racy private life for a Latin prof), despite the fact that the case was dismissed, and blackballed by the magazines he’d previously written for, he sank into hack work and destitution, mental breakdown and, finally, suicide.

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Today -100: March 23, 1914: The soldiers have the bayonets, and I have nothing but the Constitution

Sylvia Pankhurst and a thousand of her closest friends attempt to attend services at Westminster Abbey. Sylvia is carried on a stretcher because of weakness from her umpteenth hunger strike. Slight problem: when you announce plans like this in advance, people tend to show up to watch the fireworks, and the Abbey was full by the time she arrived. She held a meeting outside the Abbey, then went home in an ambulance.

Kaiser Wilhelm leaves for Corfu for a conference with his fellow Triple Alliance monarchs, Austria’s ancient Franz Joseph and Italy’s Vittorio Emanuele, to discuss monarch business.

Gen. Blas Orpinal, one of the Mexican generals who escaped from a US refugee camp, is recaptured, disguised as a peon.

British Prime Minister Asquith denies that the movement of troops and ships had anything to do with coercing Ulster but were of a “purely precautionary character,” or that arrest warrants were issued for Unionist leaders, or that he intends a “general inquisition” of officers as to whether they would “take up arms against Ulster.” It’s odd that he’s referring to Ulster not only as if it were united (“against Ulster”), but as if it were united against his policies. A reminder: this is 9 Northern Irish counties we’re talking about, some of them with Catholic majorities, not the 6 counties that became the current province.

The anarchists who led the march down 5th Ave in New York yesterday (Emma Goldman’s “crowd of dupes,” as the NYT calls them) are forming an organization of the unemployed, to take what they need.

On Malekula Island in the New Hebrides, six native teachers from the Walla Island mission station are eaten by cannibals, as was the custom.

Mother Jones is heading back to the Colorado mine region in defiance of military orders, saying she expects to be arrested: “the soldiers have the bayonets, and I have nothing but the Constitution.”

Charles Young, a negro accused of assaulting an old white woman, is lynched near Mapleville, Alabama.

Headline of the Day -100 (L.A. Times): “Mangled Finger Saves Lives of a Hundred.” A freight train went out of control and wrecked at Butler, California, but it didn’t hit a work train which had been diverted because of a Mexican laborer whose mangled finger needed medical treatment. Not really as interesting a story as the headline suggested.

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Normal

So I saw in my Twitter feed that “Marsha and Glenna are married!”, without other context, and wondered if I was supposed to know who they were. Subsequent tweets divulged that they were the first gay couple married in Michigan, and I’d read “Marsha and Glenna are married!” without it jumping out at me that this was something unusual. The new normal got normal fast. In 5 years, we’ll see an announcement about someone named Adam marrying someone named Steve, and it won’t even occur to us there used to be a moronic slogan about that.

That said, I still wish the first gay couple married in France had been called Adam and Yves.

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Today -100: March 22, 1914: I am coming to have supper with you

Sir Edward Carson says “The Government is attempting to cow Ulster by intimidation and provocation, but both will fail.” In truth, while both sides are preparing for battle, neither wants to fire the first shot. The British government orders police in Ireland not to enforce the gun licensing laws against the many Ulster Unionists going around armed. The Unionists are using motorcyclists to disseminate communications. Property-owners in Northern Ireland are taking out riot insurance policies.

Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George gives a speech in Huddersfield, calling Ulster the spoiled child of Ireland. “Look at the frothy description of the Ulster volunteers in the Unionist press. Why, there has been nothing like it since Milton’s description of the heavenly host in Paradise Lost.” He accuses the Tories of keeping the issue bubbling because they have no other policies.

The unemployed army, 61 of them anyway, crossed into Nevada after all, despite the governor’s threats. The sheriff of Elko County feeds them and forces them to bathe in the hot springs. Another group of unemployed seize a train in Redding, CA but are now heading on foot for Oregon. Shasta County will feed them at stations 20 miles apart, luring them out of the county like E.T. and the Reese’s pieces.

Headline of the Day -100: “Menaced by Suffragists.” John Barnhill, running for Congressman-at-large in Illinois, opposed by suffragists due to such views as these: “My platform is to offer to every woman a home and a husband instead of the vote, and I believe that nine-tenths of the women would rather have a home and a husband than to have the vote.” How will he provide these homes & husbands? By raising the wages of men.

The Constitutionalists in Sonora, Mexico levy a tax of 3 or perhaps 5% (semi-legible NYT) on all property owned by Mexicans, though not that of foreigners, to be paid in gold.

Carranza refuses requests from Sonora residents that he apportion the land and property of the American Mormons who fled the country.

As the battle for Torreón finally starts, Pancho Villa phones the Federal commander there to say “I am coming to have supper with you.”

A Mexican federal commander refuses to hand over the five soldiers Texas says killed rancher Clemente Vergara. Gov. Colquitt has offered a $200 reward for their capture and delivery across the border.

Maxim Gorky is to be prosecuted for blasphemy for his novel Mother.

The government in Alaska is distributing reindeer to the natives.

The NYT has a long account of the Caillaux-Calmette feud, the months of mostly untruthful articles by Calmette about the finance minister in Le Figaro that preceded his murder. In court, Henriette Caillaux explains “I was greatly annoyed at the abominable campaign against him.” You do not want to greatly annoy Madame Caillaux; she will, as the French say, fuck your shit up.

1,000 Anarchists march up 5th Avenue in NYC. Alexander Berkman, who spent 14 years in prison for attempting to kill steel tycoon Henry Frick, led the march “with a woman on each arm.” Being anarchists, they jostled pedestrians – jostled pedestrians! – and “defied the traffic regulations”.

Elsewhere in the city, Salvation Army members invaded dance restaurants on Broadway to warn tangoers (tangoists?) that they were going to hell. They were welcomed at every establishment, so they sang songs and gave little sermons, were applauded politely and offered money, which they refused, and moved on to the next venue.

The Paris police prefect tells music hall and dance hall owners: no more nudity. It’s okay in theaters, because art.

Name of the Day -100: Countess Fanny von Moltke, the German head of the Christian Science movement, which may soon be investigated and prosecuted.

All university publications at the University of Nebraska will use a uniform system of simplified spelling.

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Today -100: March 21, 1914: Of mutinies, men who can shoot and will shoot when necessary, fireplaces, slemps, and fake Hawaiians

The Curragh Mutiny: a few days ago, amidst rumors that Ulster Loyalists were planning to seize arms from military depots, orders were issued to Sir Arthur Paget, commander of the British army in Dublin, to send more troops to protect four depots. Paget refused, saying it would “create intense excitement in Ulster.” He was ordered to London for a little talking-to, and when he returned he suggested to his officers who lived in NI that they could “quietly disappear” if they wanted. The rest he told to obey orders or resign. That is, he gave them a choice, something you don’t usually do in the military. So far, over 100 officers are said to have resigned.

A personal letter, supposedly written by Kaiser Wilhelm to a Prussian princess who converted to Catholicism, is published in Germany. He tells her, “I hate the religion which you have adopted.”

The US cavalry is searching for a group of supporters of the Mexican federal government who crossed into Mexico, killed a rebel soldier, and then returned to the US.

Texas Gov. Colquist is looking to expand the Texas Rangers to patrol the Mexican border. Specifically, he’s looking for “men who can shoot and will shoot when necessary.”

King George takes out a patent on a moveable fireplace.

A Colorado coal company is suing the United Mine Workers, asking $1 million in damages. It says the UMW conspired to injure its business, bought weapons to terrify miners into striking, “caused inflammatory and intimidating speeches to be made to plaintiff’s said employees,” and restrained men in the tent colonies who wanted to return to work.

Headline of the Day -100: “Earth Swallows Miners.” Two of them, and nearly a third, in Shenandoah.

A hydro-plane service will start up between San Francisco and Oakland (the Bay Bridge is more than 20 years in the future).

Name of the Day -100: Rep. C. Bascom Slemp (R-VA), who is being sued for divorce by his wife Loberta.

Still coming to terms with women’s suffrage, the 25th ward of the Democratic Club in Chicago will distribute bottles of perfume to women who attend campaign meetings, while men continue to get cigars.

The inevitable riots follow the funeral of Le Figaro editor Gaston Calmette. A man who shouts “Assassin Caillaux!” is caned by a crowd, which he then shoots into.

A San Francisco court grants a divorce to Elvida Neilsen from Dr. Enfranng Cheng. When they married, she thought he was a Hawaiian, but after they married found out that he is in fact a Chinaman.

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Today -100: March 20, 1914: Of women and negro suffrage, divided armies, half-baked anarchists, and vulcanists (the most pacifist and logical of races)

The Senate votes 35-34 in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, well short of the necessary 2/3. Most of the debate is about race rather than sex. An amendment to the resolution offered by arch-racist James K. Vardaman (D-Miss.) to repeal the 15th Amendment loses 19-48. An amendment to restrict women’s suffrage to white women, offered by Mississippi’s other, slightly less racist (but still racist as fuck) senator, John Sharp Williams (who seems to have used the N–word rather a lot and who goes off on some weird tangent about how he’d give negroes a little leeway, for example by not sending them to prison like he would a white man for stealing chickens or for bigamy), fails 21-44. The 35 senators who voted for women’s suffrage included 14 D’s & 21 R’s; the 34 who voted against were 22 D’s and 12 R’s. Only three Southern senators voted in favor. The only senator willing to directly come out against women’s suffrage was James Martine (D-NJ), who wonders if pro-suffrage senators found objection to Jesus not having chosen six female apostles.

The White House claims that First Lady Ellen Wilson’s recent indisposition is the result of an accident – she tripped on a rug and had a minor injury, they lie. And a “slight operation” because she had a... bruise. (Update: “lie” may be too strong: she was keeping her condition secret even from Woodrow).

The NYT says there are 150,000 Ulsterites drilling in preparation for civil war. There are rumors that warrants have been signed for the arrest of Ulster Unionist leaders. The British government denies it, but Sir Edward Carson, the Marquis of Londonberry and others are making their way to Belfast, where presumably there will be a fight if arrests are attempted. In Parliament, Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law demands a referendum of the entire UK on Home Rule, including the provision for referenda in Northern Irish counties. He says if Asquith refuses his generous offer, it must be because the government wants to settle this by bullets (a bit rich from the man encouraging Ulsterites to import arms). He threatens that if there is a civil war, “The army will be divided, and that force be destroyed on which we depend for our national safety.”

The IWW invade and disrupt a meeting in Cooper Union called by socialists to discuss the unemployment problem. One of the socialist speakers calls them “half-baked anarchists” and asks why they came to “break up a respectable meeting.”

British aviators are charging passengers $250 for flights (or 15s a mile), including loop-the-loops. Evidently, women are particularly keen on the loops. Other passengers include Prince Paul of Serbia and some guy who brought along two little black pigs because why not. And yet another British military airman dies in a plane crash, the 36th.

Ironic Death of the Day -100: Prof. Giuseppe Mercalli, vulcanist, seismologist, and Director of the Vesuvian Observatory, burned to death by an overturned paraffin lamp. (Update: Wikipedia says he was actually murdered and his body burned to cover up a robbery.)

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Today -100: March 19, 1914: Of evil ferments, wahlweiber, rebels’ rears, scary geese, nickle calls, and sick Wilsons

Pro- and anti-Caillaux students fight each other in Paris, as was the custom. The Annales politiques et littéraires says that things like the assassination happen because of the “evil ferments introduced into our mores by divorce.”

Lady Bathurst, the owner of the London Morning Post, editorializes that militant suffragettes should be deported. I don’t know if she says where to.

A German court fines a doctor’s wife for describing the head-mistress of a Cologne girls’ school, who punished her daughter, as a... wait for it... suffragette. The court ruled that the word (wahlweiber) is libelous.

Huerta calls financiers and property owners together and demands that they support the military effort against the rebels, providing horses, wearing a little badge – in other words publicly committing themselves to one side.

Sexy War Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “To Worry Rebels’ Rear.” Huerta plans to send arson squads to burn railroad bridges and suchlike to bottle rebel troops up in northern Sonora.

Headline of the Day -100: “Honking Geese Scare Boy to Death.”

The New York state Assembly repeals the law for a referendum on whether to call a state constitutional convention.

The NY Assembly also votes for a flat nickel cost for phone calls within New York City.

There is a rumor that some member of Pres. Wilson’s family is seriously ill.

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Today -100: March 18, 1914: The world is arming as it never armed before

I see Britain is issuing a stamp to commemorate their depraved indifference for the safety and well-being of a minor, leading to his premature death. Also, if Dickens had written the story of a 15-year-old allowed to enlist in the army and killed two years later at the Somme, he’d definitely have named him William Tickle.

Also, I kind of want one of those stamps.

In Paris, royalists riot over Henriette Caillaux’s killing of Le Figaro editor Gaston Calmette. In the National Assembly, Deputy Amédée Thalamas (who is also a Sorbonne professor who had run-ins with the far-right when they rioted over his views on Joan of Arc, no, really they did) circulates a letter he wrote to Mme. Caillaux congratulating her on her shooting. “Brava!”, his letter concludes.

Her husband Joseph Caillaux resigns as finance minister.

Sen. William Borah (R-Idaho) says a women’s suffrage amendment to the US Constitution (currently under consideration in the Senate) will never pass unless the 15th Amendment is repealed first. Do the advocates of women’s suffrage really suppose, he asks, that the Southern states will add 2 million more people to the list of those whom they must disfranchise? The 15th Amendment is a dead letter anyway, he says, and “It is demoralizing to the negro race to place in the Constitution the form of rights that we do not mean to see they shall enjoy.” Why, he continues, the 15th Amendment might furnish a precedent for an amendment giving negroes the right to hold real estate or, god forbid, attend public school.

Winston Churchill presents Parliament with a projected budget for the navy for 1914-5, with a 5% increase, though he says that 1915-6’s budget should be lower, barring any, ahem, developments. The increase is caused by the costs of the switch from coal to oil and the creation of a flying corps. And new battleships, of course, always new battleships. The British navy, he says, “is the one great balancing force we can contribute to our own safety and the peace of the world. ... The causes which might lead to a general war have not been removed. The world is arming as it never armed before. All attempts at arresting it have been ineffectual.”

The British king and queen attend a vaudeville show at the Palladium. Suffragettes get tickets for the box above theirs and rain down pamphlets against forcible feeding (“the medical profession has now become a police force whose task it is to break the spirit of the suffragist women by injuring their bodies”). According to the London Times, no one picks up any of the circulars.

Headline of the Day -100: “Summons Bomb-Hurling Aviator.” Isn’t it nice how new technologies always create new professions, like “bomb-hurling aviator?” Pancho Villa wants Capt. Alberto Salinas to assist in the attack on Torreón, presumably by hurling bombs from his plane.

Horrifying But Misleading Headline of the Day -100: “Bare Hobo Plan to Revolt.” That is, a California National Guard general lays bare an alleged plot by the unemployed marchers to seize a federal arsenal for a revolution, not, repeat NOT a plan by bare hoboes to revolt people with their naked hobo bits.

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Today -100: March 17, 1914: Don’t touch me, I am a lady

Three days after Le Figaro printed that letter from Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux to his first wife, his current wife Henriette shoots the newspaper’s editor, Gaston Calmette, dead. On seeing her calling card Calmette reportedly said, “She is a woman, I must receive her,” and when a porter seized her after shooting Calmette, she said, “Don’t touch me. I am a lady (Je suis une dame!)” She told the police she wasn’t trying to kill Calmette when she fired five times at him (hitting him four times), just to give him a lesson.



A while back I considered concluding certain stories with the phrase “And that’s how World War I started.” This story definitely qualifies. Joseph Caillaux was not a war-monger, which was one of the reasons Calmette waged a bitter campaign against him. His secret diplomacy as prime minister during the Agadir crisis in 1911 when Germany sent a gunboat to Morocco to protest French moves in Morocco (Caillaux was a racist colonialist) defused the situation; Le Figaro has been claiming (falsely) that he gave the Congo to Germany in exchange for insider information which he used to make a fortune on the Berlin stock exchange, which he then used to buy Henriette a jeweled crown, literally exchanging colonies for diamonds.



Actually it was more a case of Caillaux considering Britain a bigger threat to French interests than Germany. More recently Caillaux opposed the increase in the length of mandatory military service. The Radical Party (of which he was president) and the center-left in general did quite well in the April-May 1914 elections, and if not for the fact that his wife was still on trial he would have been prime minister and the even more vehemently anti-militarist Jean Jaurès foreign minister in time for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassination. But they weren’t.

The Austrian parliament is dismissed after continuous disruptions by Czech MPs protesting the dismissal of the parliament in the Czech regions of the Empire (Bohemia). It had still not been recalled when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

Mother Jones, a prisoner of the military in Colorado for more than three months, is released, after a contentious conversation with the governor, but defiantly says she will return to the strike zone. “So long as I live I shall refuse to submit to military despotism.”

The California-Mexico border is under virtual martial law after the murder of the Tecate, CA postmaster by “three men said to be Mexicans.”

Dr. James Devon, a prison commissioner who used to be a prison doctor in Glasgow (who oversaw forcible feeding there), slugs a suffragette who attacks him with a whip.

Headline of the Day -100: “CATCH WOMAN IN DISGUISE.; Whip Found on Supposed Man Arrested in House of Commons.”

The NY State Senate passes a bill for equal pay for NYC 7th- and 8th-grade teachers of both sexes.

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