100 Jewish settlers living in Jaffa founded a 12 acre village located in sand dunes, dividing the property into 60 lots. It was called Ahuzzat Bayit, but only for a year, after which it was renamed Tel Aviv.
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Czar Nicholas II approved a recommendation that "laws of general Imperial interest concerning Finland" be enacted by the Duma, in which Finland had a single representative, rather than its own legislative assemble. It was part of the process of Russification of the country which had commenced in 1899, reversing the original imperial policy put in place in 1808 when Sweden had lost Finland to Russia.
The Finn's have inhabited Finland since at least 9,000 BC, and probably longer. The first references to it as an entity come from Catholic sources in the 12th Century as the Church began to Christianize the country, but it had no real political organization. It came under the control of Sweden the following century, with Sweden losing it to Russia in the Finnish War of 1808-1809. The Russification policy, something the Russians have exhibited ever since the 19th Century wherever it has control, and which effectively continues to the present day, would result in the Finnish independence movement.
Canada opened up the Métis lands in Alberta to homesteaders. 250 claims by French Canadians were registered on the first day.
His body was found floating and appeared to have gone through thin ice, as reported by Inuit guide Kudlookto. However, in 1926 Kudlookto claimed he had shot and killed Marvin, either because Marvin had started acting irrationally, or because Marvin refused to let Kudlookto's cousin, another member of the expedition, rest. Peary's daughter (as you'll recall his sons were by his native mistress and were left up in the Arctic in the abandoned care of their mother), discounted the story, although how she would know what happened in reality is another matter. Presumably from information supplied by her father.
It's hard to imagine why Kudlookto would make the story of killing Marvin up, although people do odd things.
He had been on a prior expedition. He was 29 years old at the time of his death.
Cipriano Castoro, the former President of Venezuela, was forcibly ejected from Martinique by the French.
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The Dawes Committee released its plan for the Allies to restructure the method of reparations payments being made by the Germans.
Pope Pius XI canceled plans to leave the Vatican in order to dedicate a new building for the Knights of Columbus in Rome, which would have made him the first Pontiff since 1870 to travel outside of the Vatican's walls.
Cancelled on thirty minutes notice, Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, appeared in his place. The cancellation was over the issue of Vatican sovereignty, but was spurred on due to this intended departure of the place being a major matter in the local press.
Senator Ellison Smith delivered his "Shut The Door" speech.
It seems to me the point as to this measure—and I have been so impressed for several years—is that the time has arrived when we should shut the door. We have been called the melting pot of the world. We had an experience just a few years ago, during the great World War, when it looked as though we had allowed influences to enter our borders that were about to melt the pot in place of us being the melting pot.
I think that we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door, Americanize what we have, and save the resources of America for the natural increase of our population. We all know that one of the most prolific causes of war is the desire for increased land ownership for the overflow of a congested population. We are increasing at such a rate that in the natural course of things in a comparatively few years the landed resources, the natural resources of the country, shall be taken up by the natural increase of our population. It seems to me the part of wisdom now that we have throughout the length and breadth of continental America a population which is beginning to encroach upon the reserve and virgin resources of the country to keep it in trust for the multiplying population of the country.
I do not believe that political reasons should enter into the discussion of this very vital question. It is of greater concern to us to maintain the institutions of America, to maintain the principles upon which this Government is founded, than to develop and exploit the underdeveloped resources of the country. There are some things that are dearer to us, fraught with more benefit to us, than the immediate development of the undeveloped resources of the country. I believe that our particular ideas, social, moral, religious, and political, have demonstrated, by virtue of the progress we have made and the character of people that we are, that we have the highest ideals of any member of the human family or any nation. We have demonstrated the fact that the human family, certainty the predominant breed in America, can govern themselves by a direct government of the people. If this Government shall fail, it shall fail by virtue of the terrible law of inherited tendency. Those who come from the nations which from time immemorial have been under the dictation of a master fall more easily by the law of inheritance and the inertia of habit into a condition of political servitude than the descendants of those who cleared the forests, conquered the savage, stood at arms and won their liberty from their mother country, England.
I think we now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship. I recognize that there is a dangerous lack of distinction between people of a certain nationality and the breed of the dog. Who is an American? Is he an immigrant from Italy? Is he an immigrant from Germany? If you were to go abroad and some one were to meet you and say, “I met a typical American,” what would flash into your mind as a typical American, the typical representative of that new Nation? Would it be the son of an Italian immigrant, the son of a German immigrant, the son of any of the breeds from the Orient, the son of the denizens of Africa? We must not get our ethnological distinctions mixed up with out anthropological distinctions. It is the breed of the dog in which I am interested. I would like for the Members of the Senate to read that book just recently published by Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race. Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power, and yet the youngest of all the nations. I myself believe that the preservation of her institutions depends upon us now taking counsel with our condition and our experience during the last World War.
Without offense, but with regard to the salvation of our own, let us shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens and develop our own American resources. I am more in favor of that than I am of our quota proposition. Of course, it may not meet the approbation of the Senate that we shall shut the door—which I unqualifiedly and unreservedly believe to be our duty—and develop what we have, assimilate and digest what we have into pure Americans, with American aspirations, and thoroughly familiar with the love of American institutions, rather than the importation of any number of men from other countries. If we may not have that, then I am in favor of putting the quota down to the lowest possible point, with every selective element in it that may be.
The great desideratum of modern times has been education not alone book knowledge, but that education which enables men to think right, to think logically, to think truthfully, men equipped with power to appreciate the rapidly developing conditions that are all about us, that have converted the world in the last 50 years into a brand new world and made us masters of forces that are revolutionizing production. We want men not like dumb, driven cattle from those nations where the progressive thought of the times has scarcely made a beginning and where they see men as mere machines; we want men who have an appreciation of the responsibility brought about by the manifestation of the power of that individual. We have not that in this country to-day. We have men here to-day who are selfishly utilizing the enormous forces discovered by genius, and if we are not careful as statesmen, if we are not careful in our legislation, these very masters of the tremendous forces that have been made available to us will bring us under their domination and control by virtue of the power they have in multiplying their wealth.
We are struggling to-day against the organized forces of man’s brain multiplied a million times by materialized thought in the form of steam and electricity as applied in the everyday affairs of man. We have enough in this country to engage the brain of every lover of his country in solving the problems of a democratic government in the midst of the imperial power that genius is discovering and placing in the hands of man. We have population enough to-day without throwing wide our doors and jeopardizing the interests of this country by pouring into it men who willingly become the slaves of those who employ them in manipulating these forces of nature, and they few reap the enormous benefits that accrue therefrom.
We ought to Americanize not only our population but our forces. We ought to Americanize our factories and our vast material resources, so that we can make each contribute to the other and have an abundance for us under the form of the government laid down by our fathers.
The Senator from Georgia [Mr. Harris] has introduced an amendment to shut the door. It is not a question of politics. It is a question of maintaining that which has made you and me the beneficiaries of the greatest hope that ever burned in the human breast for the most splendid future that ever stood before mankind, where the boy in the gutter can look with confidence to the seat of the Presidency of the United States; where the boy in the gutter can look forward to the time when, paying the price of a proper citizen, he may fill a seat in this hall; where the boy to-day poverty-stricken, standing in the midst of all the splendid opportunities of America, should have and, please God, if we do our duty, will have an opportunity to enjoy the marvelous wealth that the genius and brain of our country is making possible for us all.
We do not want to tangle the skein of America’s progress by those who imperfectly understand the genius of our Government and the opportunities that lie about us. Let up keep what we have, protect what we have, make what we have the realization of the dream of those who wrote the Constitution.
I am more concerned about that than I am about whether a new railroad shall be built or whether there shall be diversified farming next year or whether a certain coal mine shall be mined. I would rather see American citizenship refined to the last degree in all that makes America what we hope it will be than to develop the resources of America at the expense of the citizenship of our country. The time has come when we should shut the door and keep what we have for what we hope our own people to be.
South Dakota experienced floods on the Belle Fourche.
South Dakota became the first state to officially recognize Mother's Day, with a proclamation by Gov. Robert S. Vessy that designated "the second Sabbath in our national memorial month of May" for the same.
This followed the first church service recognizing the day, which had been in 1907 as prat of Anna Jarvis' effort to establish the holiday, which she had been working on since 1905. The first service for the day was at Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.
This brings to mind something we posted last week:
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The Japanese Diet passed a law for the Japanese equivalent of corporations.
The United Kingdom and France accepted the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
President Taft issued an executive order that deaf mutes and deaf persons be allowed to take the civil service examination.
Some of the Tafts went riding.
Helen Taft became a professor of history and college dean.
The third Taft child, Robert, not pictured here, went on to become a U.S. Senator from Ohio.
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They would learn, upon their return, that Frederick Cook had claimed the prize of reaching the North Pole first already, although his claim could not be substantiated. In 1989 the National Geographic Society determined that Peary had dome within 5 miles of the North Pole, which may or may not be close enough if it really matters.
The claim of who was first led into a bitter contest, in which Peary prevailed. Cook went on to a sad life, going into the oil business in Texas and Wyoming, where he'd be accused of fraud. He was convicted, after which his Texas claims proved to be in one biggest oil pools in the state. He died in 1940, at age 75, after having just been pardoned by Franklin Roosevelt.
As noted, I'm not a fan of Peary's. Ironically, the US flag he hoisted at the presumed pole had been sewn by his wife, whom he was cheating on in the Arctic. Peary quit talking about his trip after he took questions he received to be hostile. He died, leaving an abandoned family in the Arctic, at age 63 in 1920.
As or the first, Cook could well have been first, or not. Same with Peary, depending upon how you determine the pinpoint spot. It seems reasonably to say they were both pretty close to the North Pole, which in the context of the time, may be close enough.
The first undisputed trip to the North Pole was made in 1968.
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A hoax with long legs started on this day when the Phoenix Gazette published "Explorations in Grand Canyon: Mysteries of Immense Rich Cavern Brought to Light" claiming that S. A. Jordan of the Smithsonian Institute had found a network of interlinking tunnels filled with Egyptian artifacts and mummies. The entire matter was a hoax, but the Internet, amazingly, has kept it alive.
Seemingly all of it, including the names of the discoverer, were simply made up by reporters having some fun.
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American troops left Cuba where they had been since 1906, due to the Second Intervention in Cuba which saw the US intervene, which it had a treaty right to do, over an attempt to overthrow an elected government.
A law banning the importation of opium into the US went into effect.
In the United Kingdom, the Children Act 1908 went into effect, establishing juvenile courts, registration of foster parents, prohibiting children, under the age of 16 from working in dangerous trades, purchasing cigarettes, entering brothels, or the bars of trading pubs, and prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, for non-medicinal purposes, before the age of five.
As noted earlier, I frankly miss the point of these polar expeditions, and I think Peary was a louse.
The local agricultural newspaper, the Stockgrower and Farmer, was out. I'm only putting up the first two pages, but it was a very well done ag newspaper.
The Kansas State Board of Health banned the "common drinking cup" on trains and in public schools.
Common drinking cups were very common and it would take years to really fully prohibit their use. Their elimination gave rise to the water fountain, which had no cup, and to disposable cups.
Georgian ended its "convict lease system" with 1,200 convicted felons thereby returned from private stockades to county jails.
The Serbian ambassador to Austro Hungaria presented his government's formal acceptance of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia.
Hull No. 401, the keel of the RMS Titanic, was laid at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast.
The company still exists and still has a shipyard in Belfast. Founded in 1861, it was nationalized in 1977, and then privatized again in 1989.
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While already articulated in other ways, and the subject of a prior war, German Chancellor Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin, Prince of Bülow announced the doctrine of Nibelungentreue, that being that the German and Austrian empires were united by their common language and heritage.
It really meant more than that.
Individual nationalism was rising in this era in any event, with Austria struggling against it. Imperial Germany seemingly was a nation state, but only because it had suppressed the numerous nationalities, some large and some small, living within its borders. Unlike the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which acknowledged its polyglot nature while being principally of one faith, Imperial Germany, which included those of Westphalian, Dutch Dane, Swabian, French, and Polish nationalities, was a Prussian Empire which imposed, or tried to impose, its concept of a "German" nationalism upon its distinct regions which varied in faith. Seemingly settled in the Franco Prussian War, as late as 1909 the reluctant acceptance of Prussian dominance still was unsettled.
Nibelungentreue would give rise to militant, and malevolent, German nationalism by 1914, which would have disastrous consequences in the 1930s and 1940s. Germany as a state, however, was already accepted, even though even to this day some regions of Germany would make as much sense in a neighboring country as they do in Germany.
Cordell Hull had something else on his mind, which he discussed in a speech on this day:
I desire in this connection to direct the attention of the House to the best, the fairest, the most equitable system of taxation that has yet been devised—the taxation of incomes. Adam Smith, the father of political economy, laid down this rule of taxation:
The subjects of every State ought to contribute toward the support of the Government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities—that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the States. . . .
I have no disposition to tax wealth unnecessarily or unjustly, but I do believe that the wealth of the country should bear its just share of the burden of taxation and that it should not be permitted to shirk that duty. Anyone at all familiar with the legislative history of the Nation must admit that the chief burdens of the government have long been borne by those least able to bear them, while accumulated wealth has enjoyed the protection and other blessings of the Government and thus far escaped most of its accompanying burdens. . . .
Heretofore any suggestion from this side of the House that our system of taxation should be so adjusted as to require the aggregated wealth of the country to bear a fair share of the burden of taxation has usually met the disapproval of the other side upon the ground that such course would be socialistic, if not unconstitutional. . . .
I agree that Members of Congress are under oath to support the Constitution, and that it is the duty of the Supreme Court, under proper circumstances, to construe and expound that instrument; but I submit that where, in the judgment of Members of Congress, a palpably erroneous decision has been rendered by the Supreme Court, stripping the coordinate legislative branch of the Government of one of its strong arms of power and duty—a decision overturning a line of decisions extending over a hundred years of the Nation’s history . . . . It is entirely proper that Congress should pass another income-tax act, again raising the important questions deemed to have been erroneously decided by the Supreme Court heretofore, and by this course secure a rehearing upon these controverted questions. . . .
The world has never seen such colossal fortunes as we behold in the present age. Their owners are richly able to pay taxes. Why does the Government, founded as it was upon the doctrine of equality, persist in taxing every article of necessity which the poor widow must buy, while it permits citizens residing in other countries to hold property here of probably $100,000,000 in value on which the Government declines to levy even a single cent of tax? . . . Public sentiment is becoming aroused. The American people are loudly, insistently demanding that this infamous system of class legislation shall cease, and unless this Congress regards their wishes they will soon compel compliance, even if they have to resort to a renovated Congress.
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