Today -100: November 30, 1915: If the warring countries would go back to fighting then, they are fools

Canadian and Australian soldiers (and medical students, according to the London Times) break up a peace meeting in London called by the Union of Democratic Control, gaining entrance with forged tickets and bearing gas bombs. The Daily Express, which has been inciting such action, describes this as the “utter rout of the pro-Germans.”

It’s a World War, After All:

Germans are supposedly training Indian and Burmese insurgents in far Siam.

Henry Ford thinks that news of his Peace Ship has so inspired the warring nations’ troops – who he thinks have all heard about it – that on Christmas they will start a general strike against the war. “What we want right now is to get these men out of the murder ditches and home for Christmas. If the warring countries would go back to fighting then, they are fools.” No word yet on whether William Jennings Bryan will be on the Peace Ship, and Pres. Wilson’s daughter Margaret has declined her invitation, but they do have Charles Pease, president of the Anti-Smokers’ Protective League of America.

The Supreme Court upholds a New York law against the employment of aliens on public works projects. If I’m reading this correctly, it’s treating the city as a private body in hiring matters, not subject to the 14th Amendment.

The New York Radium Sanitarium opens tomorrow. I’m assuming every one of its patients will die horribly.

Ad of the Day:

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Today -100: November 29, 1915: Of conquests, lost provinces, poison gas, and lynchings

Germany declares victory in Serbia. Half the Serbian army are now prisoners, most of the rest have escaped into the mountains or out of the country. King Peter supposedly keeps talking about suicide. Serbia does not admit defeat, claiming to be retreating in perfect order with barely any losses.

Germany denies plans to give Schleswig-Holstein, seized in the 1860s, back to Denmark in return for its neutrality in the war. Why, it would be an insult to even suggest that Denmark could be bribed, Germany says.

Fog of War, so to speak: the Allies say that Turkey has used poison gas for the first time, at Gallipoli.

John Willey of Gibonsburg, Ohio, who was out on bail while on trial for murdering his grandmother, is lynched. He’d been getting letters threatening a “lynching bee” for some time. Since the NYT doesn’t mention his race, I assume he was white.

Ad of the day:

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Today -100: November 28, 1915: Of rodds, Parisian crime, armbands, and truces

Skirmishes between Pancho Villa’s forces and the US Army on the Arizona border kill 11 of the former. In a later clash with Carranzaists, which was supposedly due to a mistake, one US soldier is killed.

The Berliner Tageblatt said (in a 5-week-old article the NYT is just now reading) that Italy’s government and military are being secretly run by the British ambassador Sir Rennell Rodd (!), exercising his influence on Queen Elena through the royal children’s English nurse.

Émile Marie Laurent, prefect of the Paris police, says crime has almost entirely ceased in Paris since the war began, including murder, burglary and armed robbery. And with buses commandeered for war work, the streets of Paris are much safer. So he’s been focusing on the aspects of la vie parisienne he especially detests: gamblers, drug dealers, and restaurants that have both wine and live music (“not a decent combination”).

The British government is now issuing khaki armbands to men of military age who are doing work exempting them from military service or who have enlisted but not been called up yet. All the better to put social pressure on shirkers.

Pope Benedict plans to ask everyone for a Christmas truce.

Seriously: Sir Rennell Rodd.

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Today -100: November 27, 1915: Out of the trenches before Christmas, never to go back

Henry Ford gives an anti-war speech in Washington. It’s his first public speech ever and it consists of the slogan, “Out of the trenches before Christmas, never to go back.”

A meeting in London of disaffected Women’s Social and Political Union members declares that Emmeline Pankhurst is misusing the group’s name – and its funds – by associating it with pro-war rather than pro-suffrage activities. There will soon be two splinter groups, the Independent Women’s Social and Political Union and the Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Suffragist Inez Milholland reveals that it was she who proposed to her husband.

A Mrs Adamson of Philadelphia adopts a Japanese baby to test whether environment is more important than heredity. Says Mrs Adamson, “She doesn’t know that she is Japanese and will not know it until she is old enough to recognize the different racial characteristics.” Evidently if at 21, after not learning Japanese, she chooses to live in the US rather than Japan, that will have proved the importance of environment, because science.

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Today -100: November 26, 1915: I know that moral pressure will not be without its effect

Henry Ford’s letter of invitation to governors and former presidents and other dignitaries to join his Peace Ship says that Jane Addams and Thomas Edison have already accepted, which they haven’t. Asked how he expected to compel the warring nations to participate in the peace conference he intends to call, he says “I know that moral pressure will not be without its effect”.

Spoiler Alert: moral pressure will totally be without its effect.

The NYT notes that the idea of the Peace Ship originated with Rosika Schwimmer, the suffragist and internationalist who would probably not have been thrilled to be described by the Times as Austrian – she’s a Hungarian Jew. After the war Schwimmer had to flee Hungary when it went fascist (proto-fascist? whatever), but was denied US citizenship because of her refusal to take an oath to take up arms on behalf of the United States, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court which said that a citizen has the right of conscientious objection but a non-citizen applying to become a citizen does not, because logic.

The Medico-Legal Society of America wants all states to pass laws making all illegal-drug users, no matter the degree of their drug habit, wards of the state to force them into treatment, rather than wait for them to commit crimes or go insane.

Thanksgiving Day sermons in New York largely focused on the need for military preparedness. A warning someone should have given the Indians at the first Thanksgiving.

Alaska’s delegate to the US Congress, James Wickersham, will introduce a bill for statehood in the coming congressional session.

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Today -100: November 25, 1915: I intend to try to crush militarism

Henry Ford charters an entire liner, the Oscar II, to carry him and an assorted group of pacifists to go to Europe to stop the war. “We are going to try to get the boys out of their trenches and back to their homes by Christmas Day.” Well at least he’s given himself a full month. He’s invited any number of prominent people to join him, including William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Edison, who have or will both refuse. “I intend to try to crush militarism,” Ford says.

Spoiler Alert: He will not crush militarism.

Edward Ryan’s luggage explodes in Budapest. Specifically, an artillery shell which he was taking back to the US as a souvenir, as you do. Dr Ryan was head of an American Red Cross mission in Serbia.

The German Army has adopted an artificial-respiration device, involving a rubber tube and foot-operated bellows, which was invented before the war by Dr. Samuel Meltzer of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research for use by miners, to restore the breathing of soldiers asphyxiated by gas or buried in trench collapses. The Rockefeller Foundation has supplied these devices to the British, French and (more recently) German armies.

Headline of the Day -100:

A “foreign official source, in no way connected with European affairs” tells the NYT that for 6 months Germany has been funding Huerta’s attempt to start a counter-revolution in Mexico, to keep the US occupied militarily and distracted. And then the US arrested Huerta right before he could reach Mexico.

The Serbian government is now a government-in-exile, retreating to Scutari, Albania.

Greece gives the Allies permission to move their troops around Macedonia unimpeded, because what choice did Greece have? In return, the Allies promise not to keep any Greek territory they occupy during the war.

Albert Einstein presents to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the Einstein Equations establishing the theory of general relativity.

On Stone Mountain, Georgia, 16 men re-found the Ku Klux Klan. Burn a cross and everything. Next week the state of Georgia will issue them a charter. It will take a while for it to amount to anything – it may be a few years before I have cause to mention it again – but this group will grow into the mammoth Second Klan of the 1920s, which will elect (and impeach) governors in states throughout the union (Oregon, Indiana, etc), pass laws banning Catholic schools, and fight against unions and immigrants and for prohibition.

One of the men on Stone Mountain is Col. William Joseph Simmons, who will be the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He’s mostly harmless and had in mind not a night-riding, negro-lynching organization but a fraternal order much like the others he loved: Elks, Shriners, Masons, Woodmen of the World, that sort of thing (the “colonel” title came from the Woodmen of the World, although he was a private during the Spanish-American War). The fact that the body he chose to revive was the Klan is of course down to “The Birth of a Nation,” which he adored and watched over and over. One of the things he adopted from it: burning crosses, which the post-Civil War Klan did not do. He loved the paraphernalia and secret handshakes and such, which he would lovingly detail in a 54-page document called... wait for it... the Kloran. However, Simmons wasn’t much of an organizer (and liked the bottle a little too much), so his Empire will remain mostly Invisible in fact as well as name until he hired some PR people in 1920...

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Today -100: November 24, 1915: Oh, of course there was sauerkraut

Officials of the Hamburg-American Line and other Germans and German-Americans are being tried for conspiring early in the war to supply German ships illegally from the US. Including sauerkraut? the prosecutor asks a stevedore, but he can’t remember. The testimony directly implicates Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, the German naval attaché in Washington, who somehow hasn’t already been expelled from the country despite repeated links to espionage and sabotage.

The feds have found a building in Cleveland (still under construction) which they think Germans were building to store explosives for an attack on Canada.

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Today -100: November 23, 1915: I think this line’s mostly filler

Allied forces capture Tibati, in Kamerun, if you needed a reminder that this is indeed a world war or something to write on a slow news day -100.

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Today -100: November 22, 1915: Cigars v. zeppelins: the eternal Battle of the Phallic Symbols

New British regulations limiting alcohol sales to five hours a day will go into effect next week and London trade unionists are not happy, threatening to resist “by open revolt if necessary.” “No Beer, No Work” will be their clarion cry.

I think I mentioned the State Dept yanked the passport of a German-American naturalized citizen after he made some sort of remarks about Woodrow Wilson. Now, because he can’t prove that he’s a US citizen, which he is, he’s likely to be drafted into the German army. The US ambassador to Germany still refuses to give back his passport.

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Allies are pressuring Greece to join their side of the war through a “pacific blockade” of Greek ports, harassing Greek-flagged ships, etc. If that doesn’t make Greece more kindly disposed to them, I don’t know what will.

Germany isn’t very impressed with Greece’s declared neutrality either, threatening that if Greece doesn’t disarm Serb and other Allied soldiers fleeing into Greece (Serbian forces are losing quite badly right now), then German troops will invade Greece to go after them.

Anna Howard Shaw resigns as president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association.

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Today -100: November 21, 1915: Of fires, uncultivated literary taste, locusts, and careless pedestrians

Pennsylvania State Fire Marshal Joseph Baldwin says several recent fires at munitions plants were all started deliberately.

Headline of the Day -100 (NYT Magazine):  “Do Women Lack Cultivated Literary Taste?” Harry Leon Wilson, author of Ruggles of Red Gap, thinks so, and the pandering to them by publishers is dragging American literature down.

Palestine has been hit by a plague of locusts. As was the custom.

Francis Hugo, NY secretary of state, warns the NY State Automobile Association that public opinion has been hardening against reckless drivers. It’s true; since I’ve started these posts I’ve seen a shift away from viewing the running down of pedestrians as the inevitable price of modern life. In today’s auto news, Treasury Secretary McAdoo denies that his wife (Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Eleanor) had been summoned for speeding - it was her chauffeur. And Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, the sculptor, escapes the workhouse for reckless driving because there’s only one witness. However, the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce says that 90% of New York City street accidents “are due to carelessness or other fault of the injured”. Of course many of those the Chamber is blaming are children, who account for 45% of fatalities.

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Today -100: November 20, 1915: Of inflammatory street speaking, rajahs, and Paris dresses

The Allies are trying to get China to join the war. China wouldn’t be expected to do anything militarily (indeed, China is incapable of doing anything militarily), but it’s hoped this will allow Japan to focus more on its small role in the European war and less on bullying China.

Wobbly hobo poet Joseph Hillstrom is executed in Utah by firing squad. Hillstrom yelled “Fire” himself. Hillstrom still claimed to be innocent and he could prove it but that would wreck a woman’s reputation, so he didn’t. Gov. William Spry says he will now clear the “lawless element” out of Utah and stop “inflammatory street speaking”.

Britain denies German claims of revolts in India. Indeed, they say that not only is the Rajah of Bhagalpur not leading a revolt, but there is no Rajah of Bhagalpur.

Edith Galt, Woodrow Wilson’s fiancée, is having trouble ordering dresses from Paris, which is what happens when you use a German-American importer.

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Today -100: November 19, 1915: Of zep bombs, cold soldiers, safety at sea, and cases of undue importance

The Daily Mail (UK) prints a claim that unusually high death rates among those injured by bombs dropped from zeppelins must mean that the Germans are using biological warfare (they’re not).

A story going round the German Army on the Eastern front says that Gen. Hindenburg asked Kaiser Wilhelm for warm clothes for his troops but Willy said no, if they were cold they’d be more likely to take Riga and Dvinsk quickly just to warm up.

Headline of the Day -100: 

It will. Not. Do! Good day to you, sir. I said, good day!

Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes asks the Nebraska secretary of state to ignore a petition being circulated to put his name of the 1916 ballot for president (the secretary will comply).

Utah Gov. William Spry rejects Pres. Wilson’s request to stay the execution of hobo poet Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom), complaining that “Your interference in the case may have elevated it to an undue importance”. (For those clicking on the article: Hillstrom did not compose “Hallelujah I’m a Bum”).

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Today -100: November 18, 1915: Of hopeless defectives, vice presidents and senators (but I repeat myself), privy councillors, and hobo poets

This has been kind of a big deal in Chicago for the last few days: a doctor decides not to perform an operation that might have saved a new-born “hopeless defective” boy, which has now died. The doctor says the boy would have been doomed to “an animal existence and imbecility.” He says he’s done a favor for the child, “its” parents, and.... the race.

Vice President Marshall is giving Pres. Wilson and Edith Galt a Navajo blanket as a wedding gift.

Sen. Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania announces his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Right now Penrose is following the Liberty Bell as it tours around the country.

In Britain the Anti-German League is suing to remove Sir Edgar Speyer and Sir Ernest Cassel from the Privy Council because they are naturalized citizens (Speyer was American but with German parents, Cassel a German Jew).

Pres. Wilson asks Utah Gov. William Spry to stay the execution of hobo poet Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom).

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Today -100: November 17, 1915: Of exterminations, sneaky contract, and loyal and vigorous conduct of the law

Lord Robert Cecil, the British under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, denies that Britain stirred up the Armenians to revolt, saying rather that the Armenian massacres were pre-meditated by the Turks to “exterminate the Armenian race,” but adding that no, Britain didn’t intend to do anything to stop them.

German money, from the Deutsche Bank of Berlin, was used to prevent the Bridgeport Projectile Company providing shrapnel presses to the Allies, by entering into a contract that was never intended to be fulfilled and which was cancelled 12 hours after it was signed without invalidating a provision which prevents the company selling to anyone else until 1916. The whole thing is now in court.

The Albert Hall cancels a meeting Mrs. Pankhurst was to have held “to demand loyal and vigorous conduct of the war,” by which she means forcing Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey to quit.

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Today -100: November 16, 1915: You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race

Motto of the Day -100:

Winston Churchill gives a speech to Parliament, refuting point by point the charges against him for his many miscalculations as head of the Admiralty, and specifically denying that he had imposed policies against the advice of career Navy officers and experts. In other words, he’s trying to spread the blame for the Dardanelles campaign and earlier disasters as widely as possible. And he says of his decision to join the military, “I alone have open to me an alternative form of service whereto no exception can be taken and wherewith I am perfectly content.” Winnie certainly had a way wherewhichwith archaic adverbial forms.

Woodrow Wilson orders that Assistant Postmaster George Burkitt of Winnetka, Illinois be reinstated. He was fired for saying that Wilson should have waited longer after his first wife died before getting engaged (and for many other offenses).

George Bernard Shaw’s playlet O’Flaherty V.C.: A Recruiting Pamphlet is banned by the censors ahead of a production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The hero, who joined the army to get away from his family and from small town Ireland, as you do, will now on his return home have to explain his decision to his Fenian mother. “She’s like the English: they think there’s no one like themselves. It’s the same with the Germans, though they’re educated and ought to know better. You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

In my Complete Plays, it says this play was “first performed on the Western Front Belgium 1917.” Take that, censors. In the preface to the (postwar) published edition, Shaw notes that when he wrote this play recruitment of Irish Catholics was going badly. “To attract them, the walls were covered with placards headed REMEMBER BELGIUM. The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the [Dublin] Castle”. Another line from the preface: “Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it.”

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Today -100: November 15, 1915: Of bookers, champagne horrors, and aeroplanes

Booker T. Washington dies, at 59. Taliaferro, by the way, is what the T. stands for. He will be buried on Tuskegee University, which he founded 34 years ago – I’ll wait while you do the math on that one.

In recent years, Washington’s leadership of the American negro community has been slipping; his focus on negro autonomy and self-development was accompanied by an unfortunate willingness to accept segregation, Jim Crowism, and negro political powerlessness, which sat increasingly badly with the rising generation.

Headline of the Day -100: 

We’ve all been there.

The NYT thinks we should stop calling heavier-than-air flying machines by the “intolerably awkward name of ‘aeroplane’” and instead use the French “avion.” They’re not too thrilled with “automobile” either.

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Today -100: November 14, 1915: Of saboteurs, pirates, and converts

Josef Goricar, the former Austrian consul in San Francisco, says there are 3,000 spies for Germany and Austria in the US, and every act of sabotage or espionage or whatever committed by any one of them is not done on their own initiative but strictly following orders. The Austrian embassy is now claiming that Goricar is a Russian spy. Goricar denies this but says he is working for Slavic unity, whatever that means.

The US will charge Robert Fay and the other German saboteurs with crimes of piracy. It turns out there really aren’t any laws covering conspiracy to blow shit up on behalf of a foreign nation, so piracy it is.

An Italian newspaper reports that King Ferdinand of Bulgaria wrote to the pope saying that after the war Bulgaria will switch from the Greek Orthodox Church to Catholicism.

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Today -100: November 13, 1915: So church bells were the 1915 equivalent of the internet

The Austrian consul in the US, Ernst Ludwig, calls Josef Goricar, the former consul in San Francisco who accused Austria and Germany of a massive spying/propaganda operation in the US, a “has-been consul who attacks his own country.”

Winston Churchill resigns as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster so he can join the military and see some action, until he gets bored. He’ll be a major. This seems to be a reaction to Asquith setting up a small War Council, on which he planned to include Churchill but then thought better of it.

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Yesterday Berlin went wild celebrating the surrender of Serbia. However, Serbia did not actually surrender. What seems to have happened is that a General Synod was held, church bells in Berlin were rung at noon in honor of it, and everyone leapt to conclusions.

A negro, John Taylor, is lynched in Aberdeen, Mississippi.

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Today -100: November 12, 1915: Spies amongst us

Headline of the Day -100: 

Josef Goricar, the former Austrian consul in San Francisco, contacts American newspapers to say that the US is riddled with Austrian and German spies and flooded with their propaganda, including in subsidized German-language newspapers, with the especial goal of disrupting munitions production. Goricar fled Austria – something about Slavic sympathies (I think his name is Croatian) – and has been back in the US since February.

Although there is no conscription in Britain, it’s getting closer, and Lord Derby, the Director of Recruiting, gives unmarried men until November 30 to join up, or else.

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Today -100: November 11, 1915: The war upon the kindergarten goes on relentlessly

After that Austrian-flagged, German-manned u-boat sank the Ancona, the US is just now realizing that while Germany gave assurances about giving up unrestricted submarine warfare, Austria didn’t. So the US is going to pretend that Germany was speaking for its ally. Austria, meanwhile, says the sinking was justified because, they claim, the Ancona tried to run. Italy (and the Ancona’s captain, who survived) say the ship immediately stopped after the U-38 fired a warning shot and that the sub shot at the lifeboats. Noting the large number of children reported killed, the NYT says, “The war upon the kindergarten goes on relentlessly,” on land and on sea, and compares it, unfavorably, to Herod.

Now Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan are disputing whether the prophet Ezekiel would endorse or disapprove of increased military spending, because sure why not.

The Newark Police Board bans “Birth of a Nation.”

Headline of the Day -100: 

The Georgia prison farm from which Leo Frank was abducted and lynched gets a machine gun to stop such events in the future.

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