Today -100: October 31, 1915: Trying to crow like the rooster

At an anti-suffrage rally in Carnegie Hall, Col. John P. Irish of California says that only 20% of the women there take advantage of the franchise while the rest “detest it.” Further, since those 20% started voting, “juvenile delinquency has been increased 300%, simply because the human chicks are left to the hawk while the hen is up on the fence trying to crow like the rooster.”

McSweeney’s presents: 1915’s Sluttiest Halloween Costumes. Sadly, no saucy pictures.

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Today -100: October 30, 1915: Of cabinets, all the king’s horses, and aphasia

Aristide Briand announces his cabinet, which will be big enough to include every party and faction of the French Republic and several former prime ministers (in a couple of months he’ll cut it down to a size that can actually get things done).

War is hell:

Japan tells China not to restore the monarchy.

Judges overseeing naturalization cases in Chicago have taken to asking applicants whether they would bear arms for the US against their native country and whether they consider themselves Americans or European-Americans.

One form taken by shell shock is loss of speech. The Lancet reports some success in curing this with ether. Actually, that’s two cases, they’re really writing about just two cases? A third soldier achieved similar results by getting drunk.

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Today -100: October 29, 1915: Selfishness so acknowledged, without any moral sputtering or make believe

Kaiser Wilhelm loosens his rules on when he’ll be a godfather. It used to be just 7th sons, for some reason, now it’s all 7th, 8th and 9th sons, even if there’s a lowly girl in between. And if that doesn’t spur the German birth rate, I don’t know what will.

The French government headed by René Viviani resigns. Aristide Briand is cobbling together a new ministry. This all comes as a surprise to the French public. Briand is nominally a socialist, although he has long since broken with the party and moved rightward, as is the custom.

Lloyd George, speaking for the British government, emphatically denies that there are any peace negotiations going on.

He also rejects a backbencher’s suggestion that Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal funds which he still holds in England be seized in recompense for zeppelin raids. Lloyd George says it wouldn’t be “a practical method of deterring the enemy from further violations of international law.”

The NYT is unimpressed with Bulgaria’s reasons for joining the Central Powers: “If there were nothing else to be said for Bulgaria, the fact that she had cited import and export statistics to justify her conduct in this war would deserve to be remembered. It confers upon her a kind of unexpected distinction. Bulgaria is not for Kultur, at least not in business hours. Neither is she hostile to Civilization. Those things do not interest her. ... It is business; it is selfishness so acknowledged, without any moral sputtering or make believe.”

Germany will conduct a census of all its rabbits.

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Today -100: October 28, 1915: Baron Mumm keeps, well...

Baron Mumm von Schwarzenstein of the German Foreign Office denies having heard of the Germans arrested in the US for buying explosives to blow up munitions ships. He even denies the existence of a Secret Service.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: There are repeated stories in the press in Allied countries of military revolts and subsequent executions in Bulgaria.

The Allies are using the entry of Bulgaria into the war and the subsequent “Balkan crisis” as an excuse to cut their losses in Gallipoli.

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Today -100: October 27, 1915: And Republicans have been trying to set women on fire ever since

Republican party members parading in Philadelphia take a detour to attack a street-corner women’s suffrage meeting with Roman candles.

Tammany Hall isn’t taking a position on the NY women’s suffrage referendum.

California voters reject an initiative to make all state and local offices non-partisan.

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Today -100: October 26, 1915: And don’t get him started on semi-colons

Headline of the Day -100: 

Headline of the Day -100:

The US Supreme Court rules that immigration officials, in deciding whether immigrants are likely to become public charges, must consider only the immigrant (health, age and so on) and not, as some were doing, economic conditions in the area of the country the immigrants wanted to go.

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Today -100: October 25, 1915: We hope it will not be necessary to have any more executions

The passengers of a ship arriving in NY from Liverpool include 250 Irishmen escaping conscription. There isn’t any conscription in Britain (and it’ll take another couple of years to reach Ireland), but they’re escaping it nonetheless.

German Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Zimmermann says “It was a pity that Miss Cavell had to be executed, but it was necessary. She was judged justly. We hope it will not be necessary to have any more executions.” He says the law makes no distinction between the sexes. Isn’t that jolly feminist of him? “Were special consideration shown to women we should open the door wide to such activities on the part of women, who are often more clever in such matters than the cleverest male spy.”

Two Germans, Robert Fay (a lieutenant in the German Army) and Walter Scholz, are arrested in New Jersey after attempting to buy picric acid. The two are suspected of several acts of explosive-type sabotage of trains, merchant ships carrying munitions to Europe, and ammunition factories. In fact, they never got that far, but they were building explosive devices designed to take out ships’ rudders. More Germans and German-Americans will be arrested tomorrow, some for supplying the active agents with funds. After holding out under Secret Service interrogation for... minutes... Fay and Scholz confess to everything, including having received German Secret Service money. However Lt Fay says that Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed, the attachés at the German embassy in the US, refused to have anything to do with planting mines on ships in US harbors and suggested he do his sabotage in Canada instead (von Papen would claim after the war that they suspected Fay of being an English spy). The two would be sent to jail, but Fay escaped the Atlanta federal pen in August 1916 and, with the help of funds from von Papen, crossed into Mexico and eventually from there to Spain, where authorities sent him back to the US, where he went back to prison. He was released and deported in 1922. Here’s a more detailed account of the plot.

South African Prime Minister Louis Botha wins parliamentary elections, in a decisive victory for his pro-war policy.

John Albrecht Walz, a German lit professor at Harvard, calls a convention of 26 German-American organizations to encourage them to work against Woodrow Wilson’s re-election.

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Today -100: October 24, 1915: Why Bulgaria fights

The Bulgarian government distributes a manifesto explaining why Bulgaria chose the side it did. What it comes down to is that the country has more foreign trade with Germany, Austria and Turkey than with the Allies. If young Bulgarian men don’t gladly march off to their deaths to ensure the continuance of dairy exports, I just don’t know what’s wrong with them. Also, it says, Serbs are total dicks and it would be fun to kill some of them (I paraphrase). It makes a rather better negative case for not joining the Allies, saying the Bulgarian army would be working for the territorial aggrandizement of Russia and Serbia without gaining much in return, especially since Serbia is unwilling to give up any land at all (such as the Bulgarian land it annexed after the Second Balkan War). Also, too, it thinks the Central Powers will win.

A women’s suffrage parade is held on Fifth Avenue in New York City ahead of next month’s referendum. The NYT counts 20,789 women marchers, 2,539 men, 74 women on horseback, 870 in cars, and 1,068 musicians in 57 bands.

One banner, which I don’t have a picture of, read “Make New York White.” Referring to the suffrage color, really.

Here’s historian Jean Baker’s blog post on the parade. With more pictures.

Texas ranchers along the Mexican border are demanding that the government either protect them from Mexican bandits or give them immunity from prosecution for crossing into Mexico to steal their cattle back.

Cricket dude W.G. Grace dies.

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Today -100: October 23, 1915: It was not a mere coincidence that two-thirds of the accused were women

British Munitions Minister David Lloyd George says woman munitions workers will get equal pay for skilled work.

Evidently the pope is protesting to Kaiser Wilhelm about the execution of Edith Cavell because executing women is against the principles of Christianity and humanity.

Greece rejects the Allies’ offer of Cyprus in exchange for joining the war.

Germany bans the sale of all meat two days a week (including in restaurants), of pork on another day, and bans the sale in restaurants of food prepared in any form of fat on a different two days. Germany comes a little late to rationing and will never be as efficient about it as the British, which is cited as one reason they will (Spoiler Alert!) lose the war.

A Dutch newspaper is reporting that Edith Cavell’s firing squad aimed not to kill her, with only one bullet from the 12 men hitting her, so she had to be finished off by an officer. None of this is true. “The priest who was present at the execution, overcome with horror, is now suffering from a nervous breakdown.”

A Berlin newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung, paints a picture of a vast organized conspiracy centered on Cavell’s nursing school. “During the trial... the accused, almost without exception, gave the impression of persons cleverly simulating naïve innocence. It was not a mere coincidence that two-thirds of the accused were women.” In other words, they were trying to make Germany look bad if it executed them. Mission accomplished, then.

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Today -100: October 22, 1915: A crime dwarfing even that of the Lusitania

At a Trafalgar Day service in the Church of St. Martin’s in the Fields, the Bishop of London calmly discusses the execution of Edith Cavell: “Their foulest and latest crime was the murder in cold blood of a poor defenseless English girl – a crime dwarfing even that of the Lusitania. This will settle the matter once and for all about recruiting in Great Britain. ... God’s curse is on a nation, however disciplined and efficient, that tramples under foot and openly defies the laws of chivalry which once relieved the horrors of war.”

The report of US Ambassador to Belgium Brand Whitlock suggests that the Germans failed to keep their promise to keep him informed of Cavell’s trial and executed her “despite our best efforts”. Actually, his best efforts were pretty feeble.

Wireless messages cross the Atlantic for the first time. Transmissions from Arlington, Virginia are heard in Paris (also Honolulu).

Germany will fine any Belgian town which is bombed by the Allies.

Turkey counter-charges that the (rapidly diminishing) Armenian population took part in barbarous acts against Muslims, aiding Russian troops.

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Today -100: October 21, 1915: All the forces of wickedness were against the women

Russia declares war on Bulgaria (actually on the 18th, but they didn’t tell anyone for a couple of days).

Britain offers Greece a present if it joins the war on the Allied side: Cyprus.

Carrie Chapman Catt says suffragists never expected to win the NJ referendum because “all the forces of wickedness were against the women.”

The New York National Guard’s commanding officer, Maj. Gen. John F. O’Ryan, says the lesson of the European war is that soldiers have to have all initiative destroyed and be turned into “mere automatons” under the control of officers ready to shoot them if they disobey. “The recruits have got to put their heads into the military noose.” So join up today!

The US puts an embargo on arms shipments into Mexico, except to the Carranza regime.

Crowds in Petrograd demand the reopening of the Duma, while conservatives in Germany demand the closing of the Reichstag because, with so many Socialists, it is unfit to discuss peace terms.

Someone accidentally drops a grenade in a munitions factory in Paris which is now no longer a munitions factory. 52 dead. “Reports that the explosion was the result of the work of spies were absolutely denied.”

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Today -100: October 20, 1915: With bleeding heart it draws its sword against her

Headline of the Day -100: 

Male voters in New Jersey reject women’s suffrage in the referendum by roughly 133,000 to 184,000. It loses in every county except Ocean County (the Jersey Shore) and in every one of Hoboken’s 45 precincts. It is thought that some voters in Atlantic City rejected the amendment to express disapproval of the presence of black women poll-watchers.

Woodrow Wilson went to New Jersey to vote, while his fiancée, not a Jersey voter, announced her opposition to women’s suffrage. Other prominent Anti women include the wife of Vice President Marshall, the wife of Secretary of State Lansing, and the wife of Elihu Root, who many expect to be the next Republican candidate for president. And yes, the only women whose opinion the NYT cares about are wives of important men.

The new plan for the US Navy is to spend $500 million over the next 5 years to add 85 ships and 100 submarines.

Tsar Nicholas issues a manifesto about how upset he is with Bulgaria’s “treason... to the Slav cause. ... Bulgaria, our co-religionist, liberated just a short time ago from the Turkish yoke by the fraternal love of the Russia people, openly took sides with the enemies of the Christian faith, Slavism, and Russia. The Russian people regard with sorrow the treason of Bulgaria, which was so near to it until these last few days, and, with bleeding heart, it draws its sword against her, leaving the fate of the betrayer of the Slav cause to the just punishment of God.” Such a drama tsarina.

After a train is robbed near Brownsville, with bandits from Mexico killing 3 people, a posse kills (lynches) 10 Mexicans, some of them chosen more or less at random as near as I can tell.

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Today -100: October 19, 1915: A small group of men has landed the nations over there in this awful cataclysm

Russia’s new minister of justice, Aleksandr Khvostov (the NYT wrongly says interior minister), is investigating the occult German forces who are doubtless behind the series of recent riots.

Harriot Stanton Blatch has returned from Europe more convinced than ever of the necessity for women’s suffrage: “No one can go to Europe without realizing that a small group of men has landed the nations over there in this awful cataclysm.”

The German people are focusing on the Balkans as the key to the outcome of the war, one way or the other, now that the Western Front is recognized as being completely stalemated.

Turkey bans the Red Cross from coming to help the (remaining) Armenian people.

Britain removes Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton from command of the Gallipoli expedition, replaces him with Maj. Gen. Sir Charles Carmichael Monro.

Serbia complains to the US that German troops are massacring Serb civilians.

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Today -100: October 18, 1915: What Joisey women don’t want

France declares war on Bulgaria. And invades it, alongside British and Serbian troops.

Woodrow Wilson has evidently promised that when peace in Europe comes, he will advocate for the rights of Jews in Russia and Romania.

The Daily Mail (London) reports on Nurse Edith Cavell’s execution, including the untrue bit about how she fainted and was shot whilst unconscious. I wonder who started that story? MI5?

Headline of the Day -100:

The Times deduces this from the number who have joined suffrage organizations. Of course membership in the Anti organization is far smaller, but an (unnamed) Anti leader attributes this to the suffragists enrolling “infants in cradles as members in order to swell their numbers.”

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Today -100: October 17, 1915: Of redemption, St George, public executions, and movie murders

Headline of the Day -100: 

The region Italy and Austria are fighting over would prefer the fighting not take place right there.

Headline of the Day -100: 

I don’t think the NYT has previously mentioned the various ghost stories and supposed appearances of warrior angels, Joan of Arc and so on that spread early in the war, but today there’s a mention of this pamphlet,

which you can read or downloaded (free) here. The French thought it was St Michael, but the British soldiers knew it was St George, they recognized him from the money.

Joe Deberry, a negro, is executed in Murphysboro, Illinois, hanged in front of an audience of 2,000 (there wasn’t room for 3,000 more ghouls who showed up).

The NYT wonders why women are even trying to win the vote:

One Genevieve Hamilton writes a letter to the NYT complaining that there is too much killing shown in the movies, at least in those labeled as melodramas. Even when the villain is shot or stabbed, the emotion conveyed is relief that the hero and heroine can now be married rather than horror at the taking of a life. “Since the melodrama can rarely get along without the death of some one, why not let the villain pass from the films otherwise? Not by his own hand; that is not an idea to picture to youth. Let the villain become ill. Drown him!”

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Today -100: October 16, 1915: A man is only one man, after all

Britain declares war on Bulgaria. So does Serbia.

First report of the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell.

Thomas Edison says the US should prepare for a war which will be fought by machines. “A man is only one man, after all. A machine can be easily as good as twenty men. Then one man, using it, is as good as twenty men. He should be at least that good if he is American.” Properly preparing for such a war – stockpiling the materials for shells and such – would mean there would be no need for a large standing army in peacetime. Just robots or whatever the hell he’s talking about (probably not robots, but it’s hard to be sure because the word hadn’t been coined yet).

Sarah Lund of Chicago sues Dudley Field Malone, collector of the Port of New York, and Captain William Turner of the Lusitania for conspiring to allow explosives to be loaded illegally onto the ship. Lund survived the sinking, obviously, but her husband of less than a year and her father did not. Her mother also died in a maritime accident, that of the RMS Empress of Ireland in May 1914. In fact, the family was sailing for England to investigate the possibility that some random woman in an English asylum with amnesia and a fear of water was actually her. Which she wasn’t. A photograph would have cleared that up without the need for a dangerous ocean voyage. Anyway, Lund is suing for $40,000. I assume the case was dismissed, but eventually (1925) she’ll be awarded $5,629.75, covering her personal injuries and the loss of her husband and their luggage. She remarried in 1916 (a man employed in investigating Lusitania claims) and died in 1978 at the age of 92.

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Today -100: October 15, 1915: Of repugnant work, yacht escapes, and suf profs

Following another zeppelin raid on London, a meeting demands reprisal raids on Germany. The motion was passed unanimously except for one call of No, by a man who was subsequently beaten with walking sticks. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes to the London Times supporting such reprisal raids, three for every attack by Germans on an open town in Britain. He admits that British airmen “would find such work repugnant,” but it’s the only way to stop the attacks.

Six (12, we’ll find out tomorrow) German officers interned in Norfolk, Virginia escape on a small yacht. The ship couldn’t possibly cross the Atlantic, which is presumably why they were given permission to buy it, so it’s not clear where they’ve gone.

The Daily Princetonian polls the Princeton faculty about the NJ women’s suffrage referendum. Of the professors who replied, 57 are for women’s suffrage, 33 opposed. There’s a breakdown by department, if anyone’s interested.

Princeton didn’t admit women until 1969.

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Today -100: October 14, 1915: Of unselfish marriages, reserves, imposed responsibilities, and boy geniuses

A Rev. Ernest Houghton of Bristol, England starts a League for the Marrying of Broken Heroes. He says such marriages will be happier than normal marriages because they’ll be based on unselfishness. Well, unselfishness on the part of the woman, and that’s the important thing, I guess.

Greece refuses to come to Serbia’s aid against Bulgaria, denying that the 1911 Greek-Serb treaty applies here. Greece claims that “common interests demand that the Greek forces still be kept in reserve for a better use later.”

Gov. James Fielder of New Jersey (D) says that unlike Woodrow Wilson, he will vote against women’s suffrage next week “because I am very much opposed to imposing on women a responsibility which I feel certain a majority of women in the State do not seek.” Suffragists are alarmed to discover that the ballot are not numbered, making election fraud much easier.

Orville Wright sells the Wright Company. It is believed he will get $75,000 a year for the life of his patent, or $675,000, and $1.5 million for the company as a whole.

Norbert Wiener becomes a philosophy professor at Harvard at 19.

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Today -100: October 13, 1915: Of weeping kaisers, massacres, hazing, and balls

Headline of the Day -100:

James Couzens, the vice president and general manager of Ford Motors, resigns to protest Henry Ford’s peace views.

Turkey has been celebrating Bulgaria’s entry into the war with a new massacre of Armenians, as was the custom.

The students (I refuse to call them midshipmen) at Annapolis voluntarily abolish hazing.

Headline of the Day -100: 

There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere.

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Today -100: October 12, 1915: Patriotism is not enough

The German occupation authorities in Belgium execute Nurse Edith Cavell, age 49. A British nurse who operated a nursing training school in Belgium since before the war, Carvel last November started hiding British soldiers caught behind enemy lines and helping smuggle them out of Belgium. Soon she was performing that service for a stream of French soldiers, Belgian soldiers, young Belgians seeking to join the Belgian army, etc., as part of a loose underground railroad, most of which was rolled up by the Germans simultaneously, thanks to some German-paid infiltrators and a gossipy nurse. One other member of the group was executed, the rest were imprisoned and released at the end of the war; several of them did the exact same things during the Second World War.

Cavell was certainly breaking the rules of war and the Germans were within their rights to try and execute her, but boy it didn’t look good and the British exploited the story and mythologized it for all (and more than) it was worth (one of the posters below illustrates the made-up story that the German firing squad refused to carry out the order to shoot and an officer stepped in with his revolver or, alternately, that she fainted and was shot while laying on the ground unconscious). The night before her execution she told a chaplain: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward any one.” In the ‘20s there was some debate over whether these words were too pacifist to be included on her memorial. After the war, her body was repatriated and buried at Norwich Cathedral and her dog Jack was stuffed and displayed at the Imperial War Museum.

For the month after the news of the execution reached England (a few days from now), enlistment doubled. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey pointed out in Parliament that Britain never subjected even spies who happened to be women to more than penal servitude. Kaiser Wilhelm ordered that no more women be executed without his personal authorization, although a few more would be.

The NYT describes Minnie Reynolds, President of the Women’s Political Union of New Jersey: “She is a woman of middle age. There is nothing mannish about her except possibly the businesslike way in which she conducts the conversation”. Reynolds says that Woodrow Wilson’s endorsement is very helpful: “it will stop the vacant laughing of shallow minds and check these fools who go about yapping about woman suffrage, trying to make it a joke.”

Abigail Scott Duniway, Northwestern women’s suffragist and publisher, dies at 81. An early (1852) pioneer settler in Oregon, she published the New Northwest (“not a Woman’s Rights, but a Human Rights organ”) for 16 years. She opposed prohibition, mostly because she believed the association of some suffragists with that cause was responsible for the defeat of several women’s suffrage referenda in Oregon. She also blamed the opposition of The Oregonian and its editor – her brother.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The German press says there is rioting in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, while the Italian press says there are mutinies in the Bulgarian army.

At a Daughters of the American Revolution event, Pres. Wilson says that Americans must declare whether they are for America first or not, whether they are “hyphenated Americans” who want to “use the might of America in some manner not of America’s originative.” (Huh, my spellcheck isn’t complaining about originative; I guess it is a real word).

Headline of the Day -100:

William Gillette revives his play “Sherlock Holmes” at the Empire Theatre, New York. Moriarty is played (by Joseph Brennan) as Irish.

By the way, the recently rediscovered 1916 film version, the only film Gillette ever shot, will play on Turner Classics on the 18th.

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