Today -100: May 7, 1915: We must fight gases with gases

The Daily Chronicle (London) says the Cabinet is considering responding to German use of poison gas. “[W]e must fight gases with gases.” But it will still be the Germans’ fault, because they introduced it, so “an account must be duly exacted at the end of the war,” even if Britain does exactly the same thing, because if there’s one thing this war has taught us, it’s that “But they started it” is a valid excuse for war crimes.

The Chronicle also prints a letter from an officer describing the effects of poison gas on the human body in lovingly gory detail, if you’re into that sort of thing

Prime Minister Asquith describes the Gallipoli campaign as “highly satisfactory.” To whom, he does not say.

Normally the Lusitania news would show up here tomorrow, 100 years after it appeared in the papers, but I’ll make an exception and run a Lusitania-only post today at 4 a.m. PST.

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Today -100: May 6, 1915: Of helmets, dalmatians, and POWs

British soldiers are selling captured German helmets to collectors at high prices, but haven’t been able to get many, dead Germans and their helmets tending to be located in hard-to-reach no man’s land.

Serbia is worried that if Italy enters the war, it will demand the Dalmatian Coast, which Serbia considers its future war prize. Serbia hasn’t been told that its French and British allies already made that deal with Italy.

The British government opens all departments to women, so young male officials can be pressured into enlisting.

Headline of the Day -100: 

That treatment of course, was in retaliation for British segregation of prisoners captured from u-boats. Lord Cecil reports that those British prisoners are kept locked in cells and are not even allowed to smoke.  NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO SMOKE. Tory Party leader Bonar Law suggests confiscating all German property throughout the British Empire. Asquith says “The maltreatment of prisoners is a form of cruelty which was not even common in the Dark Ages, and it appears to have been left, as so many other fiendish devices in this great war, to one of the Christian nations to invent and elaborate.”

Tennessee Governor Rye vetoes a bill abolishing the death penalty, saying it would just lead to more lynchings.

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Today -100: May 5, 1915: Of acts of piracy, gas, programs for solidifying peace, annexations, and non-candidates

The responses of Pres. Wilson and former Pres. Roosevelt to the German u-boat attack on the oil tanker Gulflight illustrate their respective characters.

It’s just like Obama and McCain, isn’t it?

The London Morning Post reports that France is ready to respond to German poison gas attacks with its own gas, which supposedly doesn’t kill, just paralyzes temporarily. Britain is also considering using poison gas. It points out that a week before Germany launched its first gas attack, it falsely accused Britain of using asphyxiating gases, as a pretext.

It is believed that the decision of Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel not to attend the unveiling ceremony for a monument to Garibaldi indicates that Italy will not enter the war quite yet. An uprising in recently colonized Libya might also have contributed to a decision not to attack Austria. Yet.

The Japanese are complaining about the “tone” with which China rejected its polite demands to surrender much of its sovereignty. It is likely to re-express those demands in the form of an ultimatum, to make China realize that Japan “is determined upon the acceptance of its program for solidifying the peace of the Orient.” There’s a lot of this Orwellian shit from Japan just now, with the Japan Times calling for Japan to occupy several Chinese provinces, saying it would not be a violation of Chinese sovereignty “since its sole aim would be to insure the integrity of the country,” adding “You’re welcome,” probably.

A German airplane sinks a British submarine.

There’s an ad in the NYT (p.9) from Columbia Records for the complete opera Aida on 17 records at 75¢ each. It fails to say who the singers, conductor or orchestra are, only that they are “renowned Italian artists.”

It is leaked that a while ago the Allies offered Greece 140,000 square kilometers of Asia Minor if it entered the war on their side. The king refused and the prime minister, who wanted to take the deal, resigned.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Antwerp journalists were supposedly summoned to German occupation hq and told to prepare Belgian public opinion for an announcement of annexation by Germany. Since then, German troops failed to achieve a breakthrough at Ypres and the annexation plans are shelved, for now.

John Lawson, head of the United Mine Workers in Colorado, is convicted for the murder of a deputy sheriff during the Colorado coal strike. A general strike is being considered in response to a verdict which is largely considered to be, to use a legal term, bullshit.

Pres. Wilson refuses to give the Federal Industrial Relations Commission investigating the coal strike his correspondence with Colo. Gov. Ammons about it.

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes “wholly disapproves the use of his name in connection with the Presidential campaign. ... He is not a candidate in any sense”.

German tailors are having to rename the English words they use for some of the products of their trade, such as ulster, cutaway, reglan, smoking, and knickerbockers. So will German prostitutes, who use the exact same terms for some of the products of their trade, probably. The new terms for smoking, ulster and raglan will be abendjacke, wettermantel and haengemantel, which you’ll no doubt be surprised to notice are longer words with more syllables.

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Today -100: May 4, 1915: For nobility of spirit we have reaped slander

Glasgow clergy enlist in a special clergymen’s corps.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Hamburger Nachrichten is exercised over the supposed ill-treatment of German POWs by the Allies (the French have been making them clean the canal at Fontainebleau). Also, French newspapers have been calling them by the derogatory term “boches.” “For nobility of spirit we have reaped slander; for chivalrous war the wildest brutality.”

Someone dynamites the Bronx Borough Hall. Anarchists are suspected, but aren’t they always?

The NYT says that the torpedoing of the US ship Gulflight is “one of those acts which constitute a provocation to war.” But since Germany doesn’t actually want a war with the US, it will probably disclaim the act, pretend the sub didn’t see the US flag in the fog, apologize and make reparation.

British recruiting poster issued sometime this month:

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Today -100: May 3, 1915: Of gulflights, mountain tops, and extreme states of subdivision

The American oil tanker Gulflight is torpedoed off the Scilly Islands on its way from Texas to France. 3 dead, including the captain (from a heart attack).

Headline of the Day -100 Which Is Totally Not a Euphemism:

Race riot in Seaford, Delaware, with threats of lynchings. (Is there a follow-up to this story? There is not.)

Reynold Spaeth, a biologist at Clark College, writes a letter to the NYT in support of chemical warfare. Why, he says, we asphyxiate our unwanted animals, and “Aesthetically or humanely an intact corpse seems preferable to an extreme state of subdivision or even to a living human fraction, deprived of appendages and sense organs which we have come to consider essential.”

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Today -100: May 2, 1915: I wonder what the Germans will do next

Headline of the Day -100: 

The warning was that ad taken out by the German embassy in various newspapers suggesting that Americans not travel across the Atlantic on any British steamships (see yesterday’s post). Asked about the ad, the Lusitania’s Captain William Turner laughed and said, “I wonder what the Germans will do next.”

Bon voyage, Lusitania.



The Summit Silk Company is evicting striking silk workers and their the families from their company-owned houses.

China rejects most of Japan’s demands.

The town of Warren, Illinois swears in its first woman mayor, and indeed Illinois’s first woman mayor, Angela Canfield. Under her leadership, the town council orders the closure of the town’s two poolrooms, its shooting range, and a boxball alley (whatever that might be). And that’s just in her first 7 minutes in power.

I know what I’ll be wearing this summer.

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Today -100: May 1, 1915: Safety in speed

British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George wants to deal with the alleged problem of lost productivity in the munitions industry caused by drinking by raising the duty on alcoholic drinks.

The International Congress of Women at the Hague passes a resolution declaring that women’s suffrage would be another pro-peace move. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the British militant suffragette, says that international conflict is deliberately stoked by munitions tycoons, and proposes nationalization of armaments as a step towards universal disarmament. 1938 Superman would agree.

I’m sure Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence would have appreciated the visual aids.

Belgian and French bishops and cardinals ask Pope Benedict to drop his attitude of neutrality and come out against the Hun. Like Jesus would.

The German Embassy in the US takes out an ad in various newspapers (this one’s from the NYT).

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gives a one-hour temperance lecture at a Carnegie Hall meeting called by the National Abstainers’ Union. Hundreds then come to the front to sign the pledge, getting Bryan to sign as witness. Booker T. Washington also gives a speech. Bryan alludes to the war: “In some of the belligerent countries it has been found that loyalty to Bacchus, Gambrinus, and Barleycorn is greater than loyalty to King, Kaiser or Czar. The aeroplane that drops its bombs from above and the submarine that shoots its torpedoes from below are less to be feared than the schooner that crosses the bar.”

H.G. Wells writes about what the Allies’ war aims should be: restoring Belgium (and enlarging it to more defensible borders), a “rational readjustment” of borders. And, of course, “the chastening of Germany.”

This British recruiting poster was issued sometime in May:

It’s all about the hats.

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: April 30, 1915: Of congresses of women, Ypring it up, donkey decoys, and resented terms

The International Congress of Women at the Hague passes resolutions in favor of nations solving their differences with arbitration rather than mass slaughter, opposing secret treaties, abrogating all existing secret treaties, and transferring territory between countries only with the consent of its inhabitants.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan denies plans to recognize Carranza’s or any other government in Mexico.

Four Germans celebrate the German victories in Ypres. Unfortunately, they do it in Vancouver, and a lot of Canadians died at Ypres (indeed, a lot of Canadians were gassed at Ypres). The Germans, who are now under arrest, insist that their party was merely a housewarming.

Headline of the Day -100:

Don’t click on the link if you don’t want to read about 1,000 dead donkeys.

In Britain, an Anti-German League and a British Patriotic League have formed, both aimed at making sure anti-German sentiment doesn’t end with the war’s conclusion.

Samuel Pearson, an American citizen who served as a general for the Boers in the Boer War, files a discovery suit in Wisconsin to find whether Bethlehem Steel and other companies are secretly making shrapnel shells for the Allies in violation of Wisconsin law, which seems like an odd thing for Wisconsin law to cover. Pearson says such sales could hurt his investments in Germany.

Frances Blascoer of the Public Education Association writes a report on black children in New York public schools. There are two private schools for black children because the principals of the city’s public schools don’t want them.

One of those principals says black children’s class spirit is bad. Imagine that.

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Today -100: April 29, 1915: Of gas, u-boats, crucifixions, emotional people, and setting an example of self-sacrifice

The Prussian military newspaper Kreuz Zeitung says it was the Allies’ “behavior” that forced Germany to resort to poison gas. And the Frankfort Zeitung says poison gas is much more humane than artillery shells, producing a quick, painless death.

The French armored cruiser Léon Gambetta is sunk by an Austrian submarine commanded by Lt. Baron George von Trapp. They didn’t mention that bit in The Sound of Music. 684 of the Gambetta’s crew of 821 are killed.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times):

A report on the massacre of Christians in Urumiah, Turkish Persia, confirms that while local Kurds carried out the acts, they were assisted by Turkish soldiers. Who raped the women (which the NYT, surprisingly, states explicitly).

Hey, the very next article I read also has a rape reference. German suffragist leader Dr. Lida Heymann, VP of International Congress of Women at the Hague, says “Worse than death, yes, worse than hellish, is the defenselessness of women in warfare and their violation by the invading soldier!” The American delegates finally arrived at the Hague after the British navy held up their ship in the English Channel for four days. The NYT/Chicago Herald’s story is written by Jane Addams, who is the Congress’s president. 

Writing in the Boston Herald, Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, sister of the president of Harvard, says the Women’s Peace Party, which sent Addams and others to the Hague congress, “is one of the most dangerous movements which has threatened our emotional people for a long time,” appealing to “emotional women [she really doesn’t like emotions, does she?] whose hearts are so large that many people have mistaken them for heads.”

Greece offers to join the war on the Allies’ side, but are told they’re offering too little help and demanding too much in return.

The Church of England’s Convocation comes out against prohibition. The next day it voted to “invite” the church and laity to “set an example of self-sacrifice” re alcohol, only after being reassured that this did not mean total abstinence. The Dean of Canterbury says he tried not drinking once, “and found it a failure in that it impaired his health.”

Carranza claims to expect the United States to recognize him within a couple of weeks. He also plans to defeat Villa any day now.

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Somebody white just has to face that emotion and say that we’re sorry

1968 after the Martin Luther King assassination, NY Mayor John Lindsay walked the streets of Harlem. He is credited for helpign prevent the riots that occurred elsewhere. He said, “Somebody just has to go up there. Somebody white just has to face that emotion and say that we’re sorry.”

Compare and contrast with the leadership style of would-be President Rand Paul: “It’s depressing. It’s sad. It’s scary. I came through the train on Baltimore last night. I’m glad the train didn’t stop.”

Rand Paul: Chicken shit leadership you can count on!

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Today -100: April 28, 1915: His hour of disgrace

The US asks Turkey to please stop massacring Armenians.

The British War Office is asking the women of Britain to make gas masks for the soldiers. Well, gauze things more like the face masks you might wear to protect against smog in downtown Beijing, which should be totally effective against chlorine gas. (Actually, worse: when dry, the cotton was just useless; when wet, the user couldn’t breathe at all.)

The British say their troops at Gallipoli are “thoroughly making good their footing”. The Turks say they’ve been beaten back to the coast.

The NYT piles on the First Lord of the Admiralty for the mistakes of the Dardanelles campaign: “Now Winston Churchill’s hour of disgrace has come.” But really it’s more the fault of Asquith for allowing him to keep the job after war began: “For nine disastrous months he has been trying to do work for which neither his training nor his temperament fits him.”

Germany plans to purchase food enough for four more years of war.

The governor of Georgia is receiving thousands of letters calling for Leo Frank’s sentence to be commuted.

Margaret Buckner Lytle files for divorce from William Lytle, a black dentist in Oakland, California she married seven years ago under the mistaken belief that she was also a negro. She was raised in a convent and didn’t know her parents but a recent blood test has proved that she is white. So she wants a divorce. Or an annulment since inter-racial marriages aren’t legal.

The pianist & composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin dies, at 43. From blood poisoning. Because he scratched a pimple. So don’t do that.

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Today -100: April 27, 1915: Of dardanelles, war babies, last shots, and funny fat men

Headline of the Day -100:

The Morning Post (UK) is already calling for Winston Churchill’s hide for the mishandled Dardanelles campaign. They say he ignored the military’s advice by insisting that the Dardanelles could be forced through naval bombardments alone, without landing soldiers. The London Times, however, complains that the UK is attempting too many military campaigns simultaneously, with side-shows like the Dardanelles drawing resources away from the main show on the Western front.

The Archbishop of Canterbury will head a committee to investigate “war babies” – who they are, where do they come from, what do they want, etc. No, really, it’s planning to determine “the steps to be taken if the problem proves a serious one”. What “steps” might those be? Harrumphing, I imagine. Lots and lots of harrumphing.

The British are blaming riots in India on Turkish propaganda to Muslims in the Raj. 

The Florida Legislature rejects a resolution for a women’s suffrage referendum.

The New York World takes a poll of “prominent” men about women’s suffrage. They’re against it.

Headline of the Day -100:  

Obit of the Day -100: John Bunny, the “famous funny fat man” as the LAT refers to him, who is considered the first major film comedian for such shorts as A Cure for Pokeritis, Bunny and the Twins, Bunny Buys a Hat for His Bride, Bunny Buys a Harem, The Pickwick Papers, etc. A few survive and can be seen on YouTube. “The name of John Bunny,” the NYT says, “will always be linked with the movies. ... at the time of his death his face was one of the best known in the world.”  This face.

There’s an article on Bunny in the next Sunday NYT Magazine written by Joyce Kilmer, who suggests that cinema has revived the art of pantomime.

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Today -100: April 26, 1915: Of treacherous projectiles, massacres, and hat critics

Germany admits to using poison gas, although only, in the words of the Frankfurter Zeitung, “as a reply to the treacherous projectiles of the English and French.” Treacherous projectiles are the worst kind. The French report that the Germans are using chlorine gas. No shells, they’re just letting it loose when the winds are pointing in the direction of the French trenches, and hoping it doesn’t change direction.

Italy is still negotiating simultaneously with the Allies and with Austria, whose latest offer is that Trieste be given autonomy rather than be handed over to Italy outright. It’s almost like Austria doesn’t take seriously the threat of the mighty Italian military.

In fact, on this day Italy signed a secret treaty with the Allies. Italy would enter the war and in return get large portions of Austria, Albania (well, as a protectorate, but we all know what that means), some of Germany’s colonies, etc. Italy would only get some of this after the war, and threw a decades-long sulk over the slight to its (very minor) contributions to the Allied victory, a sulk which helped Mussolini take power.

Reports from Armenia say that the inhabitants of 10 Armenian villages have been massacred. One thing about the Armenian Genocide: everyone knew it was going on, right from the start, and knew many of the details, if they cared to.

Headline of the Day -100: 

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Today -100: April 25, 1915: The free sea was not given by God to England to be rented out to various tenants

Bernhard Dernburg, a former German minister of colonies who has been in New York making semi-official but deniable statements about Germany’s positions, says that if Britain wants Germany to leave Belgium, it just has to agree to neutralized seas (“The free sea was not given by God to England to be rented out to various tenants”), free cable (meaning telegraphic communications, not free HBO, although Dernburg is a huuuuge Game of Thrones fan), a recodification of international law, and German expansion “in parts of the world where that expansion would not be objected to by the people of the lands to be settled,” wherever that might be.  “There will never be any universal peace,” he tells the University Club in Brooklyn, “until the German people have the same chance and the same right to branch out as have the people of other nations.” I believe there’s a word for that in German...

The Terra Haute city council impeaches Mayor Donn Roberts, evidently thinking he can’t continue to perform the job from his current location in Leavenworth Prison.

A play currently being performed in Frankfurt, Germany, “Wir Barbaren” (We Barbarians), is a musical comedy about Allied atrocity charges against Germany.

All the French feminist organizations are refusing to send delegates to the Hague peace conference (French feminists are perhaps the most blood-thirsty). Germany has banned German delegates and also Swiss ones from traveling through Germany.

Another article about British feminists and the conference quotes Emmeline Pankhurst accusing daughter Christabel of being influenced by the German propagandists she claims are behind the conference. That would be Sylvia, NYT: Sylvia was the anti-war firebrand, Christabel the pro-war one. Forgotten daughter Adela, now in Australia, is also anti-war. Anyway, the Home Office has given passports to 20 women it will allow to go to the Hague (out of c.120 who wanted to go), which is a charade because they also stopped all passenger ships going there.

The LAT reports that there are only a few doctors remaining in Glasgow, and people have been asked to call doctors only in an emergency. School authorities are being asked to do without school medical officers. The doctor shortage, evidently hitting Glasgow earlier than elsewhere in Britain, is of course related to the war and will continue throughout, leading, as you might guess, to greatly improved general health among civilians.

235 Armenian political, religious, and intellectual leaders are arrested in Constantinople overnight, and murdered.

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Genocide and the passive voice

It’s the 100th anniversary of the genocide that dare not speak its name. Or at least whose name American presidents dare not speak. Thee Armenian Genocide. Barack Obama issued a statement.

He doesn’t use the word genocide, but he does call it “the first mass atrocity of the 20th Century.” I assume in the hierarchy of violence to which all leaders subscribe, the mass atrocities inflicted in the many 20th century wars that preceded 1915 don’t count as mass atrocities because they are the legitimate acts of governments, just as drone strikes don’t count as murder.

Also, the Armenian Genocide was not the first mass atrocity of the 20th century, it wasn’t even the first genocide. Hello, Herero people of Namibia! Sorry we keep forgetting you!

“the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire were deported, massacred, and marched to their deaths.” All that passive voice. Deported by whom? Massacred by whom? Did they march to their deaths because they really enjoyed marching?

Also note the use of the archaic-sounding “Ottoman Empire” rather than Turkey.

“Amid horrific violence that saw suffering on all sides...” Wow, even Bush didn’t straight up adopt Turkey’s everybody-was-doing-it narrative.

Then he sort of skips past the specifics of mass atrocity to celebrating Ambassador Henry Morgenthau for collecting information about what was going on and making it public, and the American people for relief work. All of which is worth celebrating, but really, dude, everything that happens is the world is not all about us.

“I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view has not changed.” You haven’t used the word “genocide” since 2008, so don’t trumpet your consistency.  “Peoples and nations grow stronger, and build a foundation for a more just and tolerant future, by acknowledging and reckoning with painful elements of the past.” Like remember that time I had to admit blowing up some hostages “accidentally” with a missile shot from another thing whose name I don’t use? Good times.

Now go read today’s Jon Schwarz post on the subject.

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Today -100: April 24, 1915: Of incidental gases, and tourists

Headline of the Day -100:

I’m not sure what the point of lying about it is. If your poison gas is effective, which admittedly it isn’t yet, your lie is going to be rather easily disproved. I think they’re just lying out of habit now.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: 500 French soldiers have been blinded by some sort of German chemical hand grenades, according to some woman who heard it from some guy.

A Tory newspaper listed all the British Cabinet members it claims failed to follow the king’s example in turning teetotal. The 1st Lord of the Admiralty isn’t in the cabinet, is he? I can’t really imagine Winston giving up champagne and whiskey for the duration.

Allied troops land on the Gallipoli Peninsula. This will go well.

Britain is now also blockading Germany’s Africa colony Kamerun.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan is refusing to issue passports to Americans who want to visit the battlefields of the Great War as tourists. Evidently a party of potential sightseers had written the State Dept asking how close they might be allowed to the trenches, whether they’d be able to get good pictures of ruins, how much have food prices risen, and “What papers ought one to be sure to carry to be sure to avoid the inconvenience of spy mania?” State has now created a form letter for such inquiries saying that the Dept “believes that the presence of American tourists in and about the places where military operations are being carried on is most undesirable”.

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Today -100: April 23, 1915: Some corner of a foreign field

Britain stops all shipping between the UK and the Netherlands for unspecified reasons that certainly have nothing to do with preventing delegates going to the peace congress at the Hague.

Headline of the Day -100:

Sounds like some sort of internet sex thing.

Really sounds like some sort of internet sex thing.

Um, yeah.

Danish explorer Algot Lange writes the warden of Sing Sing, asking him to supply Lange with any soon-to-be-released prisoner willing to go with him to Brazil. The prisoner would have to want a fresh start in life (if your idea of a fresh start involves tropical diseases) and be willing to spend three years wandering around the Amazon for no pay. I don’t know how it went – I can find no record of Lange after 1915.

The French government will make war orphans wards of the state.

Adèle Hugo, the mentally ill daughter of novelist Victor Hugo (played by Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H.), dies at 84.

Killed in action: Rupert Brooke, Bloomsbury Group poet, 27, described by Yeats as the handsomest young man in England. Drink him in:

Well, I say he was killed in action, actually it was an infected mosquito bite. His war poems express the early, optimistic phase of the war, and not the fun depressive, angry, ironic war poems of the later war, but all the better to cement his posthumous image as symbol of all the idealistic pretty young men sacrificed by cynical and/or incompetent old men.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
    That there’s some corner of a foreign field
 That is for ever England. There shall be
    In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
 A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
    Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
 A body of England's, breathing English air,
    Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
    A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
       Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
 Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
    And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
       In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


Greece, by the way: the foreign field he’s buried in is in Greece.

Update: Nice article on Brooke by Joanna Scutts on the New Yorker website today.

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Today -100: April 22, 1915: A day at the circus

The California Legislature rejects a bill to abolish the death penalty (retaining it only for prisoners who assault guards or other prisoners and who are already serving life terms), 38-30.

It also rejects a bill making women eligible for jury duty.

Lloyd George says there are 750,000 British soldiers currently in France. He also says that more ammunition was expended in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle than in the whole of the Boer War.

Leo Frank wants his lawyers to ask for a pardon, given that he’s not actually guilty of anything, but they will ask only for a commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment. Can they do that?

Dickhead of the Day -100:

The Hungarian parliament refuses to vote for war credits.

Glasgow is hiring women as street car conductors to replace men who left for the war.

The British government has decided to cancel the elections that were supposed to be held by the end of the year. Life is so much easier without a real constitution: one law says you have to hold an election, so you pass another law that says you don’t have to hold an election. It will be nearly 8 years between the 1910 election and the 1918 one (the Parliament elected in 1935 sat for 10 years).

The US responds to the German ambassador’s note complaining about US arms sales to the Allies. The US note worries that Amb. Bernstorff’s language “is susceptible of being construed as impugning the good faith of the United States in the performance of its duties as a neutral,” which obviously can’t be what he intended (it’s totally what he intended). The US insists again that it would be a violation of neutrality if it stopped arms sales to one side in the war. The argument goes that since the government currently lacks the legal power to stop such sales, changing the law to give it that power would be un-neutral.

The NYPD conducts simultaneous raids on 24 “free medical museums” and arrest 43 quack “doctors.” The museums feature wax figures showing the effects of cancer, TB, etc. The visitor is then asked if they’d like to see a Viennese doctor (they’re mostly pretending to be Viennese) who will tell them that they in fact have cancer, TB, etc, and sell them cures, such as a $300 bottle of “magic water” supposedly containing radium sold to a widow to cure her baby’s stiff shoulder.

Barnum & Bailey’s Circus performs at Madison Square Garden before 5,000 spectators, who all get to see horseman Otto Kline, whose thing is jumping between racing horses, miss. “The crash as his head struck the boards was heard all over the Garden.” The show went on as doctors worked on Kline backstage, to no avail.

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Today -100: April 21, 1915: If any man wants a scrap that is an interesting scrap and worth while, I am his man

Austria is rushing troops to its border with Italy. Just in case.

A few days ago, German zeppelins flew over Britain, got a little lost, dropped some bombs more or less at random, and flew away again. German newspapers, naturally, are thrilled. The Hamburger Fremdenblatt says “Britons have learned that between heaven and earth there are things undreamed of in their philosophy, and they are German things.”

Lloyd George says the British government won’t be introducing conscription.

In retaliation for the Austrians supposedly cutting out the tongue of a Russian scout, Austrian officers taken prisoner by Russia will no longer be allowed to keep their swords, which is evidently humiliating.

Woodrow Wilson gives a speech calling for a policy of “America First,” because one day all those European countries will come to us begging for our “cooler assessment” and help in settling their little differences because “We are the mediating nation of the world.” Because the US is a melting pot, he says, we can understand all nations. Further, the US has no “hampering ambitions” as a world power, or at least no colonial ambitions: “We do not want anything that does not belong to us.” Cough. His desire for neutrality, he says, is not from a “petty desire to keep out of trouble. ... I do not want to walk around trouble. If any man wants a scrap that is an interesting scrap and worth while, I am his man.” But nations, like people, are most respected not when they fight at the drop of a hat, “whether he knows what the hat is dropped for or not” (he doesn’t utter the name Theodore Roosevelt here, but he doesn’t have to, does he) but those with “absolute self-control and self-mastery.” Didn’t George Costanza win that one? “Now, I covet for America this splendid courage of reserve moral force”.

Speaking of hampering ambitions, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan criticizes Rear Admiral Peary (the Arctic explorer)(did someone call him Shnorrer?) for proclaiming, “We cannot stand still. A hundred years hence we shall either be obliterated as a nation or we shall occupy the entire North American world segment.”

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times):

The Wisconsin Legislature rejects a resolution for a referendum for women’s suffrage. The New Jersey Legislature votes for a special election on women’s suffrage (and other constitutional amendments), but sets it for October 19, so that if it passes it will be too late for the November general elections.

A mob attacks the Louisiana, Missouri jail, attempting to lynch a black man under arrest for stabbing a white man, but are driven off by police gunshots.

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Today -100: April 20, 1915: Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury

The Supreme Court denies Leo Frank’s habeas appeal, ruling 7-2 that his rights were not violated by his not being in court when the verdict was read. It was perfectly valid, the Court says, for Frank to waive his right to be present after being informed that he’d probably be lynched if he were present. They deny that the guilty verdict was in any way influenced by the baying mobs outside the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes dissents, with Charles Evan Hughes concurring: “The argument for the appellee, in substance, is that the trial was in a court of competent jurisdiction, that it retains jurisdiction although, in fact, it may be dominated by a mob, and that the rulings of the state court as to the fact of such domination cannot be reviewed. ... Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.”  The subtle clue Holmes spots that the jury “responded to the passions of the mob” is, to repeat, that the trial judge thought it prudent that Frank not be in court when the verdict was read, because an acquittal would result in his lynching. “It is our duty... to declare lynch law as little valid when practised by a regularly drawn jury as when administered by one elected by a mob intent on death.”

Frank thinks he won’t be executed, that “Truth and justice will eventually prevail.” Yeah, that’s probably what’ll happen.

A municipal court judge in Chicago dismisses charges against two men who refused to pay for their drinks in a saloon Sunday, because saloons are not allowed to be open on Sunday. Sounds logical to me.

The British government decided not to withhold the passports of the dozens of women who intended to go to the women’s international peace congress at the Hague, because that might look bad. Preventing any ships traveling to the Continent, however... (The article suggests this was just a coincidence. It wasn’t.) Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence will be there only because she’s arriving from the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt tries (and fails) to get William Barnes’s libel suit against him dismissed, saying he didn’t intend any libel against Barnes, just against the boss system of which he and Tammany’s Boss Murphy were the two heads.

Yesterday was “King’s Pledge Sunday,” in which Britishers were encouraged to pledge not to booze it up until the war ends.

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