Today -100: November 28, 1916: Of dejected lawyers, ambassadors, and beer

Charles Evans Hughes is going back to his old law firm, Rounds, Schurman & Dwight. His son CEH Jr will join him.

Britain refuses to give safe passage to the newly appointed Austrian ambassador to the United States. The last one, Konstantin Dumba, was expelled over a year ago for running sabotage operations in the US, which is Britain’s excuse for not allowing a new one.

August Busch of Anhauser-Busch joins Gustave Pabst in supporting regulation of drinking in order to ward off total prohibition, as the brewers attempt to separate themselves from the liquor interests. Busch supports abolishing bars in saloons so patrons are only served at tables, banning treating, and for allowing saloons to to sell only beer, light wine and non-alcoholic drinks as in Germany.

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Today -100: November 27, 1916: Of southern Slavs, the reasonable use of beer, and being all undressed and nowhere to go

The London Times says Austria plans to create a puppet Southern Slav state along the lines of the Polish one in order to legalize conscripting Serbs in the parts of Serbia it’s occupying.

Gustave Pabst, the beer tycoon, says brewers are in favor of “true temperance.” After all, “thoughtful men and women are not opposed to the reasonable use of beer”.

Movie of the Day:

The first million-dollar movie evidently. The film is lost, because of course it is. And it’s got nudity! “There are long passages when Miss Kellermann wanders disconsolately through the film all undressed and nowhere to go.” They say that like it’s a bad thing.

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Today -100: November 26, 1916: How long must women wait for liberty?

Inez Milholland Boissevain, lawyer and poster girl of the women’s suffrage movement, often found on horseback leading a parade, dies in Los Angeles at age 30 of pernicious anemia, brought on by her hectic schedule campaigning across the country for Charles Evans Hughes in the interests of suffrage. Her last public words were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

I’ve been a little surprised by the Times’s obsessive coverage of her health over the last month: “MRS. BOISSEVAIN VERY ILL.; Throat Seriously Affected from Constant Speaking on Campaign Tour,” “Mrs. Boissevain Is Operated On,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN VERY ILL.; Two Transfusions of Blood Made In Effort to Save Her,” “Mrs. Inez M. Boissevain Near Death,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN IS LOW,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN BETTER,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN SINKING,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN BETTER,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN VERY LOW,” “Mrs. Boissevain Slightly Better,” “MRS. BOISSEVAIN IS BETTER.; Attending Physician Reports Her Condition "Somewhat Improved,” “Mrs. Boissevain Is Recovering,” “MRS. INEZ BOISSEVAIN DIES IN LOS ANGELES.”

Headline of the Day -100:

Also, too, marmalade. 

Venizelos’s self-proclaimed Provisional Government of Greece declares war on Germany and Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the Entente is demanding that the army (the king’s, not venizelos’s) turn over military supplies.

In Britain the National Transport Workers’ Federation protests government plans to introduce non-white workers on the docks.

The Sunday NYT Magazine section has an article by Arthur Conan Doyle on how ghosts are totally real.

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Today -100: November 25, 1916: The world wants a new Mexico

Headline of the Day -100:

Russian Prime Minister Boris Stürmer is forced out by the Duma and is replaced by Transport Minister Alexander Fyodorovitch Trepov, who will also continue in that post. He is “progressive” in comparison to Stürmer and the czar and Rasputin (who he will try to bribe to stop interfering in policy), which is rather a low bar. It isn’t especially reassuring that his brother Dmitri was in charge of suppressing the 1905 Revolution and his father was also a reactionary general.

The US-Mexican Commission come to an agreement that would see US troops withdrawn from Mexico 40 days after it’s signed by Wilson and Carranza – if conditions in northern Mexico are sufficiently stable. Since that’s a subjective standard, it sounds to me like an agreement that the US will continue to do whatever it damn well wants. And after they withdraw, US troops can continue to enter Mexico to attack “marauders.” The Americans say there’s no reason Mexico should have any problem with that because the marauders are their common enemy. There is of course no reciprocal right for Mexican forces. Interior Secretary Franklin Lane, head of the US delegation, says “this is only a beginning to a policy which will make a Mexico that we can live with. ... We will help her to get into good shape if she can understand that we mean to be her friend.”

Someone cut down Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite sassafras tree. He offers a reward for the malefactor’s capture.

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Today -100: November 24, 1916: There’s nothing like a democratic emperor

The new Austrian Emperor Karl I says that yeah, Austria is totally gonna stay in the war. It seems like, with all the false rumors of peace proposals going round, any time someone takes office now (new emperors, Russian prime ministers, whatever) they have to commit to staying in until the bitter end.

Headline of the Day -100:

He is also “a good shot, a sportsman, and an expert dancer”.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The city, not a small, bug-eyed dog.

Headline of the Day -100:  

The author, not the city.

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Today -100: November 23, 1916: Of britannics, zitas, concessions, Londons, and diets

The Britannic, a White Star liner commandeered for use as a military hospital ship, sinks near Greece. The British are saying it was torpedoed, but it actually hit a mine. The Britannic was the largest British ship of any type, sister ship to the Titanic. 30 dead, 1,035 survivors. There were no patients onboard.

The new emperor of Austria-Hungary is Franz Joseph’s grand-nephew, 29, or as he’s now known, Karl I of Austria and Karl IV of Hungary. Two of the brothers of the new Empress Zita – Xavier and Sixtus – are fighting in the Belgian Army, which will make for an awkward Austrian Thanksgiving. Zita died in 1989 at 96, by the way, 67 years after Karl.

Charles Evans Hughes concedes.

Jack London dies. He was 40.

12 employees of the Chicago Health Department are taking part in an experiment to prove that you can eat perfectly adequately for 40¢ a day. They started with a breakfast of liver, bacon, an egg, muffins & butter, apples and coffee. That’s one meal, you understand, 13¢ worth.

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Today -100: November 22, 1916: So suck it, Victoria

Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I dies. He was 86 and had been on the throne since he was 18, a longer reign than Queen Victoria’s.

Here’s the London Daily Mail obit: “Emperor Francis Joseph had been politically defunct for two years. In the present war he played a very insignificant part and it is exceedingly doubtful whether had he been in vigorous health he would ever have consented to become the passive agent of a German plot.” Etc.

The Habsburg family tree in general and the line of succession in particular have been... subject to revision... over FJ’s lifetime. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of course, but also FJ’s only son Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide pact with his mistress at Mayerling in 1889, the execution of his brother Maximilian in Mexico, his wife’s assassination by an anarchist, one of his nephews lost at sea. Also his granddaughter Elisabeth Marie (Rudolf’s daughter) shot her husband’s actress mistress to death

If Germany does not intend to give up its Polish territory to the puppet Polish buffer state it and Austria announced, the German state of Prussia really doesn’t intend to give up anything. That land is “sacred and inviolable,” says Prussian Interior Minister Count Friedrich von Loebell. The Prussian Diet votes for no portion of Prussian Poland to be given to, um, the Poles. Though to head this off, Prussia might even give Poles some rights. 

Norway, which is not participating in the war (it has a note from its mum), will have to institute food rationing. And Britain orders a potato census.

The New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party plans to push for another women’s suffrage referendum in 1917, even though the 1915 referendum failed. This time it promises “No more pink teas, no more parlor meetings and abstract lectures for the suffrage cause.”

For the first time, the Philippines’ Senate has a full-blooded Moro, Hadji Butu. There are also two Moro – or, as the NYT puts it, “reclaimed savages” – in the lower house.

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APEC dress-up fail

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was held in Peru this year, and the traditional Make All the Leaders Dress Funny portion was just lame.



So lame.

Times past:

Ponchopallooza ‘04 in Chile:



Bar Girls in Hanoi, 2006:



Whatever the fuck this was supposed to be in Australia 2007:



Ponchopalooza ‘08 in Mexico:



Chinese Restaurant Waiters in Singapore 2009:




Here’s my post from the 2006 summit:

It’s so awkward when everyone shows up at work wearing the same thing.

Wow, that totally flatters his ass.


I am totally freeballing it under this thing.


Man, I coulda gone commando too.

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Today -100: November 21, 1916: Follow your Bliss

Eleftherios Venizelos says that he and his movement aren’t against the Greek crown, just the “system of despotism” around it. He says that after the war he’ll make sure there will be no more “forcing on the people against their will policies calculated to drive the country to national suicide.”

The Republicans are trying to figure out when to concede the presidential election. But the important news: the RNC’s treasurer is named Cornelius Newton Bliss, Jr. Cornelius Newton Bliss, Senior was McKinley’s secretary of the interior.

The American Federation of Labor recommends ignoring any injunction against strikes based on the dictum that labor is property. I don’t follow that, but the labor-is-property thing is central to an anti-union ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court earlier this year (see p. 181 here).

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Today -100: November 20, 1916: Hallmark does NOT make a card for that

The elections demonstrated that William Jennings Bryan’s influence over the Democratic Party in his home state of Nebraska is gone. So he seems to be leaving the state, moving his things to his other homes in Florida and North Carolina, and leaving the Democratic Party for the Prohibition Party.

At the beginning of the month, the Germans lobbed their one-thousandth shell at Rheims Cathedral. I’m picturing a monk sighing and then painstakingly illuminating a new hash mark on a manuscript.

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