April 16, 1905 (Monday)

RECORD DAY FOR IMMIGRANTS: Nine ships arrived yesterday at New York and another eight are expected today. Yesterday’s ships brought in about 11,870, which would be a new one-day record. The picture above shows graphically where some of the people came from during a day in March in which more than 11,000 immigrants arrived.

AGAIN, IN SPRINGFIELD: Evidently a third negro was lynched in Springfield, some hours after the other two. Very early on the 15th, members of the same mob that lynched Horace Duncan and Jim Copeland went back to the jail and grabbed Will Allen, who faced murder charges. The crowd forced him to climb a tower and put a rope around his neck. The rope broke as he dropped. So he ended up falling into the pyre that contained the charred remains of the other two men. He was pulled out and brought back to the top of the tower. Another rope was tied around his neck. Then he was hung again – and riddled with bullets. Gov. Folk of Missouri says he wants to bring the lynchers to justice. It's the "show-me" state, so we'll wait for proof of that.



UP FROM A TOMB: Easter got a bit cheerier under the gray shroud of Vesuvius. In Ottajano, two elderly women were pulled from the rubble – after six days of entombment. Rescuers had given up hope of finding anyone. Evidently, they were protected by the rafters of the house in which they were trapped. Somehow, they managed to survive on morsels of food.

April 15, 1906 (Sunday)

STUNNING “JUSTICE” IN MISSOURI: I’ve got to get out of the way and let the first paragraph of this story simply speak for itself. The dateline is Springfield, Mo. The dateline is April 14. Here goes:
"A mob of 3,000 men to-night took Horace Duncan and Jim Copeland, negroes, from the county jail, hanged them to the Goddess of Liberty on the Court House and built a fire under them and roasted them to death. The men were charged with assaulting Mabel Edwards, but it is said they were probably innocent."



MEMORABLE WORDS: Finally, President Roosevelt gave his “Man with the Muck Rake” speech. He spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the new building for the House of Representatives (right). I have no time nor space to quote it all here, but I do think it’s worth reading. Here’s an excerpt:
"I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander, he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed."

BOY SPARKS PANIC: About 400 people were gathered in a Roman Catholic church in Chicago yesterday, when a boy opened the church door and yelled “FIRE.” The crowd tried to rush out. Some jumped through windows. Most everyone rushed to the center aisle. Some of the floor joists cracked, and that added to the panic. Four people were killed. There was no fire. The boy who cried “Fire” will likely never be found. How could someone do that? Boy, there’s a lesson in there somewhere. I guess the only thing you can do when someone cries “fire” in a theater is to stand up and yell “water” – louder.

April 14, 1906 (Saturday)

UP AND AWAY: Four men will try and set some records today when they take off in the biggest balloon in America from Pittsfield, Mass. The balloon holds about 53,000 cubic feet and can easily hoist a car that can carry four people. They hope to set a height record and make it to Boston or some other spot on the Atlantic coast. Ballooinst Dr. Julien F. Thomas will keep an eye on the effort. Earlier this week, he and his wife made a trip from Pittsfield in Count de la Vaux's balloon called "L'Orient." Thomas claims he will outdo whatever todays travelers accomplish. He and his wife are the current holders of the record for height. Thomas said, "If they go high, I will go higher; if they go far, I will go further." We will have to wait and see if this is just so much hot air.

DEFENSE RESEARCH TAKES A DEADLY TURN:Prof. Frantz Wurtenberger might have made progress in his attempts to find a better explosive than dynamite. He has spent a lot of time in his laboratory in some salt meadows two miles from East Chester, N.Y., because the U.S. government has offered $1 million if he succeeds in making something that is 20 times more powerful than dynamite and which can be ignited by an electric spark (as opposed to a fuse). Well, yesterday, there was a terrific explosion in his lab, and now the professor is in horrible condition in Mount Vernon Hospital. The article in The New York Times ends with this paragraph: "Prof. Wurtenberger, his friends say, realized that the first test of the electric spark might result in his death, but rather than give up his life work, he decided to go ahead. These friends declared that he had an idea his explosive would revolutionize the warfare of the world." To me, the only way to truly revolutionize warfare would be to end it.


TROUBLED BREWING IN PITTSBURGH: Officials at Carnegie Institute of Technology are furious with a brewer in Pittsburgh. He is marketing something he calls Tech Beer. They are upset because they think it reflects badly on Carnegie TECH. He doesn't seem to care. The billboards remain.

April 13, 1906 (Friday)

PLAY BALL: The National League opened its baseball season yesterday. The average duration of the four games was a snappy 1 hour 49 minutes, and that included a 12-inning game. Attendance ranged from 3,500 to 17,000. Before the Philadelphia Quakers and world champion New York Giants squared off in Philadelphia, a band led the players across the field. All joined in and raised the U.S. flag to the top of the pole. (That's Roger Breshahan of the New York Giants on the left, in 1905.) The ceremonial "first pitch" went like this: Philadelphia Mayor Weaver tossed a ball onto the field from the upper pavilion of the stands. An umpire caught it. Papers pointed out that the teams from the "West" played each other. The "West" matchups pitted Chicago v. Cincinnati and St. Louis v. Pittsburgh. Evidently, nobody in baseball has looked at a map of the country. Granted, it's as far West as the teams go, but did anyone hear of Oregon?

ASHES TO ASHES: More word drifts in from Vesuvius. It looks like about 5,000 homes have been destroyed. Lots of people have headed to Italy to help out. Among them is the Princess of Schleswig-Holstein. She set off in an automobile to visit people in hospitals in desolated towns. Her auto got stuck in the ashes. She had to walk 12 MILES in ash that was about 3-feet deep. Here's how one news writer describes the scene in today's Post-Standard: "Above, the heavens are gray like the earth beneath, and seem as hard and immovable. In all this lonely waste there is no sign of life or vegetation and no sound is heard except the low mutterings of the volcano. One seems almost impelled to scream aloud to break the horrible stillness of a land seemingly forgotten both by God and man." Sure wish there was a way to see more pictures of the blast.

SECOND THOUGHTS: Everything was pretty normal yesterday when Judge McMahon of General Sessions court in New York City got ready to step off a Broadway trolley at its rear door. Briefly, a couple of men blocked his way. He instinctively checked for his watch. It was still in his pocket. Then he reached for his hip pocket. His wallet was gone. He spotted the thief and watched as he dropped the wallet on the ground. A newsboy picked it up and returned it to the judge. It turns out that the thief was the same pickpocket that the judge had shown mercy on a couple of days ago by giving him a suspended sentence. The judge believes that the thief realized who owned the wallet and decided to show some mercy of his own. The money was intact.

April 12, 1906 (Thursday)

THE DRUNKARD'S CURE: J.W. Haines of Cincinnati is still at it. Here's part of an advertisement that was in today's editions of The Post-Standard in Syracuse. He's pitching a concoction called Golden Specific. If you send in your address, he will mail to you a sample -- in a plain wrapper. Evidently you can add some of this to milk, tea, soup etc. and after a couple of days "he will be cured in a few days and cured so he will never drink again." He might want a fifth of Golden Specific, though. I hear it's got plenty of alcohol in it. I wish I knew more about Haines, but I can't help with that. He says, in the ad that, "The drunkard can't save himself, you women have to do it for him." It doesn't say what to do if the woman is the one who likes to drink.


VESUVIUS COOKED THINGS 'EL DANTE': There seem to have been plenty of writers in the Naples area when Vesuvius exploded. Nearly every day there seems to be an eloquent description of what happened in one of the papers. In today's Washington Post, there's an item by Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the Century Magazine. Here's an excerpt:

"On arriving at Torre del Greco, the heavens seemed to open and we were soon half buried in ashes and hot cinders. The train drew up in total darkness, relieved only by lightning flashes. Thus we waited events. Soon the darkness took purple and yellow tinges, the detonations became louder than the loudest thunder clap, and the ashes burned our eyes. It was a perfect picture of Dante's Inferno. The train could not proceed so thick were the ashes on the track, and just at this point the train broke in half, and the poor women fugitives, thinking they were about to lose their lives, began to chant litanies for the dead, giving a last weird touch to the infernal scene."

At one point, Johnson walked a couple of miles in ashes that were 2 to 3 feet deep.

April 11, 1906 (Wednesday)

MAXIM(um) SECURITY: Russian writer Maxim Gorky (right, in 1900) arrived in New York yesterday (Hoboken, actually). The Times has quite a long story about his arrival. I liked the description of how he gazed at the Statue of Liberty as his ship, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, slid by on its way to the pier:
"Gorky paid renewed homage to America when the Kaiser came abeam of the Statue of Liberty. He had just fled from a swarm of interviewers and sought the seclusion of his cabin when the band on deck struck up Sousa's march, 'Hands Across the Sea,' by way of greeting the goddess...For fully two minutes (Gorky and his wife) stood there with the delegation waiting at the door and looking on. Gorky seemed fascinated by the giant figure that held the torch of liberty over everything within sight."
He was greeted by thousands at the Hoboken pier. He had a hard time making it through the crowd, until "a flying wedge of customs officials, Hoboken police, and pier hands sallied into the crowd Cossack fashion, and pushed it bodily back sufficiently to make a passage for Gorky and his party to the elevator."

THE MUCK RAKE'S PROGRESS:Norman Hapgood, editor of Collier's Weekly since 1903, yesterday stole the march a bit on President Roosevelt. In anticipation of Roosevelt's criticism of investigative journalism in "The Man with the Muck Rake" speech scheduled for Saturday, Hapgood defended his work during a speech before the Phillips Exeter Alumni at the Hotel Manhattan. Here's how the New York Times quotes him: "To my mind, this temporary reaction against disclosures of public corruption is entirely without significance. It only points out slight and necesssary exaggerations which are necessary when any good work like this goes on." Among the good works was a story in Collier's a year ago, by Upton Sinclair about the Chicago meat packing industry and one by Samuel Hopkins Adams, who exposed patent medicines with "The Great American Fraud." Without these exposes, Congress probably wouldn't be looking into a food and durgs act or a meat inspection act.

EARTHSHAKING PREDICTION:I've been ignoring the eruption of Vesuvius, which really got going in the first week of the month. The eruption has been devastating. Maybe 500 are dead. The Times printed a cable from the author F. Marion Crawford. Here's a passage: "I saw men, women and children and infants, whose mothers carried them at the breast or in their aprons, fleeing in an endless procession. Dogs, too, and cats were on the carts, and sometimes even chickens, tied together by the legs, and piles of mattresses and pillows and shapeless bundles of clothes. All were white with dust. Under the lurid glare I saw one old woman lying on her back across a cart, ghastly white and, if not dead already of fear and heat and suffocation, certainly almost gone. We ourselves could hardly breathe."
I forgot to mention that Sunday's New York Times (April 8) had a long article titled "Earthquake May Ingulf all Europe, Says German Scientist." (Yes, it was spelled "Ingulf.") He says the eruption at Vesuvius and the explosion in March of the mine in Courrieres in Northern France indicate that earthquake-related disaster lies ahead in the Eastern Hemisphere. If he's right, it's a good idea to get as far away from Europe as possible, like maybe to San Francisco.

April 10, 1906 (Tuesday)

THE DOME OF THE ROCK(efeller):The reporters and photographers in New York City were kept busy yesterday. Here's the news: Billionaire John D. Rockefeller emerged from his Lakewood, N.J., estate. It was front page news in The New York Times and hit Page 3 of The Washignton Post. He has been hunkered down in Lakewood trying to avoid process servers from Missouri, which is investigating Standard Oil. Here's how the Times described the stakeout of "the swarm of photographers" at his 54th Street residence: "They surrounded the ... homes, with lenses adjusted, and braved out a shower of sleet and rain all day in the hope that ... Mr. Rockefeller would suddenly appear disguised to the taste of a dime novelist and make a mysterious trip from house to house." Speaking of disguises, both the Post and Times mentioned the gray wig that Rockefeller began wearing last September. Remember how that really caused a stir? The magazine cover shown here was printed shortly before he began the wig-wearing, I'm pretty sure. I think it came out last July. He was evidently tired of the way that cartoonists and others polished up their humor on his bald head. I'm sure this kind of celebrity-hunting journalism that focuses on businessmen will fade in time.

MUCKING ALONG: People seem to be looking forward to President Roosevelt's speech on Saturday. The title is "The Man with the Muck Rake." He'll make the address to mark the laying of the cornerstone of the new building of the House of Representatives. The title comes from Pilgrim's Progress. Congressman Nicholas Longworth, the son-in-law of the president, got a jump on it yesterday with a speech to the Hamilton Club in Chicago. He agrees that there's too much criticism of government in the press. Here's a sentence: "It seems to me that the fashion of assailing public men is amounting almost to hysteria."

HEALTH WARNING FROM THE DEEP SOUTH: The Times reports that a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama in Mobile -- Seale Harris -- says consumption is ravaging blacks in the south. The article says, "He said it was the opinion of medical men generally in the South that the negro race was likely to become extinct in this country through the ravages of disease, especially consumption." There's no mention in this article of any cure needed for some ongoing man-made ravages, such as lynching.

A QUESTION OF ROYAL STATURE: The Washington Post prints a notice that was spun by the Boston Globe that points out many of the kings in Europe come up short when compared with their queens. Alexandra is taller than Edward (England); the Czarina looks down on the Czar (Russia); the Kaiserina is taller than the Kaiser (Germany); and the shoulder of Queen Helena is the ending place for the top of the head of her king (Italy). The Globe points out that the Kaiser won't be photographed with her unless she sits and he stands. And no amount of medals can make him any taller. In fact, the baubles might pull him down a couple of centimeters.