1913 Timeline of Events, January-April

Timeline of Events: 1913, January-April ​

January 1: The Russian Empire formally frees the last of its serfs.

January 4th: Arthur Schlieffen, of the “Schlieffen Plan”, dies at the age of 79. Perhaps mercifully, he will not live to see his plan fail.

January 11: Tibet and Mongolia sign a mutual defense treaty.

January 13th: Electors gather in 48 state legislatures to formally cast their votes. William Jennings Bryan receives 357 votes, and Theodore Roosevelt 174.

January 16th: The first wireless telegraph transmission is exchanged between the United States and Germany.

January 17th: Raymond Poincare is elected President of France.

January 19th: “The call for Peace”: The out-going US President William Howard Taft addresses the Jewish advocacy organization B’nai B’rith on its 70th anniversary. He criticizes the US senate for concluding treaties with France and Britain, and warns about the possibilities of war. He wishes luck to his successor, William Jennings Bryan, in the pursuit of securing a durable international peace. In the press, his speech is widely understood as a rebuke to the more hawkish policies of his rival, Theodore Roosevelt.

January 22nd: The Sagamore Meetings. A number of high profile Republicans, business leaders, and Repblican-friendly labor figures meet at Roosevelt’s estate in Sagamore Hill, New York. Over the next week, they will try to hash out an agreement that will see Roosevelt return to the Repblican Party. John D. Rockefeller and several of the Vanderbilt children are in attendance, along with several Republican Senators and state party leaders.

January 24th: Trouble at Sagamore. Business leaders wish to see a rolling back of antitrust measures in return for acquiscence to Roosevelt’s welfare and regulatory reforms. Roosevelt, though less committed to antitrust enforcement, still views it as a vital tool for disciplining capital, and he refuses to endorse any legislation that would roll back antitrust law.

January 26th: The United States Congress passes a bill requiring a literacy test for all immigrations. The bill is part of a larger push to restrict immigration into the country after three decades of swelling immigration.

January 28th: The conclusion of the Sagamore meetings. Although a grand bargain was not reached, Roosevelt will re-join the Republican Party. He will be permitted to form a “progressive caucus” within it. In reality, this means that Roosevelt loyalists will be guaranteed at least forty percent of the committee seats at the next Party convention.

January 30th: The British House of Lords vetoes a bill for Irish Home Rule.

February 1st: The Ottoman Empire, after months of internal political convulsions, agrees to accept the peace dictated by the great powers. The First Balkan War seems to be near an end.

February 3rd: Peace talks to finalize the the loss of Ottoman territories breaks down, and fighting resumes in Adrianople.

February 5th: Austria-Hungary and Romania agree to renew their military alliance for seven years.

Febrruary 8th: The United States and Nicragua sign a treaty permitting the United States to build a canal along a East-West Axis, linking the Atlantic and Pacific. Nonetheless, the agreement may be made obsolete by the construction of the Panama Canal, which is nearly complete.

February 10th: Twelve miners and four mine guards are killed in labor clashes in West Virginia.

February 11th: Soon to be inauguated, President-elect Bryan gives a speech denouncing the “Lords of Mine and Rail” who “drive man to ungodly violence through their own ungodly greed”. Several Republican newspapers charge Bryan with “Attempting to justify anarchist disorder”.

February 12th: After reviewing the electoral votes, Congress officially declares William Jennings Bryan the winner of the election.

February 13th: Mary Harris Jones, a 83-year old labor activist, is arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. The next day, William Jennings Bryan gives a speech condemning the violence in West Virginia, but insisting that the blame lied principally upon the “Aristocracy of Coal” which “treated American laborers like serfs, while responding with surprise and chagrin upon finding they had a peasant revolt on their hands”.

February 14th: Taft vetoes the literacy test bill, and it narrowly avoids being overriden.

February 22nd: The chaos of the Mexican Revolution and worries about violence against American citizens in Mexico leads Taft to order 4,000 men to Galveston, Texas for a possible intervention. This number quickly swells in the next few days, reaching 10,000 soldiers.

March 3rd: A mob rushes the 8,000 strong women’s suffrage procession in Washington, injuring several women. Later that day, Bryan makes another address. While it is fairly well-known that he supports women’s suffrage, he has not campaigned on the issue out of fear of provoking backlash. Without explicitly endorsing women’s suffrage, in his speech he denounces the “riotous mob of hooligans” who “In their flagrant display of uncivilized aggression, have done a greater service to the cause of woman’s suffrage than any would have thought possible from such criminals.” Bryan’s oratory, and its reporting and discussion by national newspapers, is quickly becoming a part of the American media environment. His supporters see his speeches as honest and plainspoken wisdom; his opponents, as demagoguery and incitement.

March 4th: William Jennings Bryan is inaguarated as the 28th President of the United states at 1:21 PM, 81 minutes after Taft’s term officially ended. Before leaving office, Taft signs legislation created an independent Department of Labor. Previously, Labor and Commerce were part of a single department, the department of Commerce and Labor.

Marth 5th: Cabinet nominations commence. The majority are expected, with Bryan allies of convenience and principle staffing most prestigious departments. However, there is one exception: Andrew Carnegie, the man previously behind one of the largest steel trusts in the country and one of the previous bete noire ‘s of Bryan’s oratory, is nominated for Secretary of State. In recent years, the two men have exchanged correspondence, finding their views aligned on questions of international peace and imperialism.

Bryan takes the highly unusual move of directly addressing congress on this matter: “Men of every station, rich or poor, industrialist or factory worker, baron of the fields or plower of them, instinctually recognize that war in our era will ruin all the manifold work of our civilization. Against those who espouse the un-christian doctrine that war and violence are the natural vocation of man, we must insist that the barbarism of war is destructive of man’s character and spiritual calling, and that those who clamor for it do so in violation of the supreme law of our creator which enjoins us to peace and human fellowship.” Some Congressmen, particularly republicans, will joke that they were not aware that the Capitol was being converted to a Chapel. They will have many more occassions to make this quip.

March 14th: Searching for a way to formalize Bryan’s speech-making, Bryan will host around one hundred and fifty reporters in a second office every week to deliver an address on the state of the nation. Soon, the reporters start clamoring to ask questions of the President, and the sessions are extended to make room for ten to fifteen minutes of exchange between Bryan and the reporters. Within a few weeks, citizens of Washington D.C. and the surrounding states begin streaming into these press conferences as they become something of a public spectacle, leading to complaints from many reporters that they were being crowded out. Bryan’s staff eventually rents out a larger building, quieting these complaints. These weekly meetings are widely considered the origin of the modern Presidential Press Conference.

March 17th: William Jennings Bryan withdraws the United States from the “Six Power Loan” to China, declaring that the State Department must “have the goal of fostering the peace and development of all nations, not acting as a collecting agency for JP Morgan, with the Army and Navy as their insurance policy”. Several newspapers applaud Bryan’s stance against “the shadowy foreign powers behind international finance”.

March 26th: Bulgarian troops capture Adrianople, delivering a blow to the Ottoman war effort.

March 28th: As the Mexican Revolution continues, Secretary of State Andrew Carnegie announces a policy of “Good-will and Friendship”, declaring that the United States will not intervene in the internal affairs of Mexico so long as American lives and financial interests in the country are not threatened.

March 29th: J.P Morgan dies peacefully in his sleep.

April 1st: A week after the capture of Adrianople, the Turkish government agrees to cede upwards of 60,000 square miles of its territory in Southeastern Europe to states in the anti-Ottoman coalition.

April 4th: With Bryan’s quiet acquiescence, much of the civil service starts the process of segregation. Some departments will remain markedly more segregated than others, as cabinet secretaries will have a good amount of discretion in determining how to carry out the policy. Nonetheless, growing pressure by Southern Democrats and Bryan’s insistence that the campaign keep its promises ends up leading to a formal, rigid system of segregation in almost all departments by the end of the year aside from Labor, which has had its hands full disentangling from the Department of Commerce and is largely staffed by comparatively progressive union bureacrats.

April 7th: Congress begins its first normal, legislative session. Relations have been somewhat ackward between congressional democrats and the President, not least because the Democratic speaker, Champ Clark, was recently defeated by Bryan at the nominating contest. Not helping is Bryan’s inexperience with Congress: he had only spent four years in Washington, and it will take time for him to acquaint himself with the legislative process. Nonetheless, the Democrats have expanded their majority in the house and control the Senate, and the progressive wing of the party is optimistic about passing a number of their legislative priorities. On the top of the list is the establishment of a Federal Income Tax, the creation of a national reserve banking system, a reduction in tariffs, the promotion of labor rights such as an 8-hour work-day and national minimum wage, and a labor-friendly reform of employment law to make it easier to form and join unions.

April 9th: The 17th amendment is ratified in Connecticut, establishing the direct election of American Senators. Roosevelt, Bryan, and Taft all supported the measure, and it is cheered by progressives in both parties. Bryan declares in his weekly speech that “Now that the common man has won his right to determine his own representatives, we can expect those here in Washington who have arrived out of base cunning rather than meritorious service to be punctually stripped of their titles in the next elections.”

April 14th: 200,000 Belgian workers strike after the government fails to end the plural vote system which accords more voting power to the wealthy and propertied. In his weekly address, Bryan mentions the strikers sympathetically, causing a small diplomatic row with the Belgian government.

April 15th: Bryan delivers an address to Congress denouncing the California State Assembly for passing a bill that will make it illegal for Japanese aliens to own property in the state. “What issue have we with these people, who have with our assistance lifted themselves up into the open country of civilization? After forcing their shores open to intercourse and exchange with the great throng of humanity, are we now so blind that we believe we can close ourselves off without incurring the just outrage of the world?” After a national campaign of denunciation and a fair deal of electoral threats, the California State Senate is cowed into rejecting the bill. Bryan receives a great deal of praise in the Japanese press, and relations between the two nations begin to warm.

April 16th: Bulgaria and Turkey agree to a six-day ceasefire. The war seems to actually be near its end now, though after the failed cease-fires and agreements of the past, there are still significant doubts.

April 19th: Bulgaria, Serbia and Turkey sign an armistice after the Bulgarian Government approves the peace plan drafted by the Great Powers.

April 20th: Bryan and Carnegie appear in a joint press conference, announcing a plan to secure “Perpetual Peace between all Nations” through the creation of a diplomatic body which would adjudicate and investigate all controversies between states before they are permitted to go to war. Shortly thereafter, Bryan meets with diplomats, most of whom are uniformly skeptical of this plan. Nonetheless, they are instructed to present it to European states.

April 25th: Bryan receives word that European leaders are uniformly opposed to such a plan, viewing it with a mixture of bemusement and disdain. This steels Bryan in his conviction that the old states of Europe are too committed to the expansion of their colonial empires to seriously pursue peace. Nonetheless, he decides to allow Carnegie to go forward in negotiating more piece-meal treaties between the United States and other countries which would create bilateral mechanisms of arbitration.

April 27th: The 125,000,000 loan to China is signed by the Chinese Prime Minister. In his weekly press conference, Bryan warns Britain, France, Germany, and Russia against “The practice of finance imperialism, which robs the productive peoples of this earth from their hard-earned labor.” This remark further irritates European leaders and diplomats, but does not lead to any official denunciation.

April 28th: Guatemala requests the United States’ aid after the United Kingdom demands it pay 10,000,000 in debt. Carnegie meets with the British Ambassador Cecil Rice, informing him that Bryan, widely considered something of a wild card in European capitals at this point, would not look kindly on any form of gunboat diplomacy.

April 30th: Germany declares it will respect Belgian neutrality.