Monday, May 14, 2018

Today -100: May 14, 1918: Oh the huma... no, I guess not


German POWs are saying that Field Marshal Hindenburg is dead. He isn’t.

New York now has an “anti-loafing” law, requiring men aged 18 to 50 to have a job. Loitering in the streets, pool halls, saloons, etc will be considered prima facie evidence of loafing. Students and men out on strike are ok. Gov. Whitman admits that the law is of questionable constitutionality, but since New Jersey enacted its own anti-loafing law, “undesirable persons” have been coming to NY to escape it.

The US citizenship of Frederick Wusterbarth, the former postmaster of Clifton, New Jersey, is revoked because he said he wants Germany to win the war. The grounds are that he obtained citizenship fraudulently 36 years ago, swearing allegiance to his new country while retaining a superior allegiance to his old one. This involves the court taking his current feelings as proof of his state of mind 36 years ago (the court says that attachment to the US always grows over time, so he must have been even more disloyal back then), which is bad logic and even worse lawyering. There’s a lot of crappy lawyering aimed at dissent in 1918.

Jewish peddlers on the East Side of New York City, you know, the old-timey ones with the push-carts selling fish and whatnot, are now selling Thrift Stamps (the cheap version of War Stamps).

Infantry sergeant Ernst Flentje is court-martialed for saying that Woodrow Wilson is incompetent and that the US shouldn’t have entered the war. He is sentenced to 30 years.

Czech members of the Austrian House of Lords (Herrenhaus) demand an independent Czech state.


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1 comment:

  1. Emma Goldman had her citizenship taken away in 1909 on equally bogus grounds. She had naturalized through her now long-estranged husband, who had become a citizen in 1884. But he had been two years underage, apparently. "The statutes governing such procedures were quite lax compared to present laws," the NYT said. So the court stripped him and Goldman of their citizenship. "Emma Goldman Now Alien" was the NYT headline. This set the stage for her later deportation.

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