Today -100: August 14, 1912: Of lynchings, funerals, and traps to catch the votes of discontented people

A mob seizes a 16-year-old black youth in Columbus, Georgia, after he receives a sentence of only three years for manslaughter of a white boy, and you know the rest.

Sing Sing set some sort of record for most executions in a day this week. And the bodies of five Italian men who were sent to the electric chair for a single murder are put on display at an entrepreneurial undertakers on Mulberry St. Everyone is welcome! Donations gratefully accepted.

Eugene Debs, in a letter to the NYT, says that the really progressive planks of the Progressive Party were stolen from the Socialist platform, but that the Bull Moose Party contains too many diverse and conflicting economic elements, and its platform is too much a hodgepodge, to form the basis of national party, and further, it depends too much on the personality of one man, who has “shrewdly seized upon the prevailing popular unrest and has baited his platform like a trap to catch the votes of the discontented people.” Gotta say Debs pretty much nails it.

Composer Jules Massenet dies.

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.