Intro: Death of a King
Famed historian Barbara Tuchman opens The Guns of August with the funeral. Nine kings riding in procession. Five heirs apparent. Forty royal highnesses. Scarlet and blue and purple, three by three through the palace gates, plumed helmets and jeweled orders catching the morning sun. It was, she writes, the greatest assemblage of royalty ever gathered in one place, and of its kind, the last.
She is writing about 1914. But the funeral was in 1910.
Edward VII died on the sixth of May, age sixty-eight, of bronchitis and a succession of heart attacks he refused to let stop him working. He had spent almost sixty years as Prince of Wales, mostly excluded from power under his mother Victoria, permitted to spend those decades in the role he filled naturally: charming, cosmopolitan, pleasure-loving, at the center of the best rooms in Europe. When he finally became king in 1901 he was already fifty-nine years old, and he reigned for nine years. A short tenure for a man who gave an entire era its name.
What the Edwardian era named was not exactly a politics or an ideology but a feeling — an atmosphere of elegant certainty, of a world arranged for the comfort of those who had always arranged it. Edward moved through Paris and Berlin and Biarritz like a man who owned the continent, which in a sense his family did: his nephews and cousins sat on the thrones of Germany, Russia, Spain, Norway, Greece, Denmark, Romania. The nine kings who rode in his funeral cortege on the twentieth of May were not strangers. They were relatives attending a family death, though none of them could have said exactly what they were burying.
History would answer the question for them. The muffled bell of Big Ben tolled as they rode. On history's clock, Tuchman writes, it was sunset. Four years later most of those same men would be at war with one another, and within a decade several of those thrones would be vacant for good. The funeral was a last gathering — the old world assembling for its own memorial service without knowing it.
1910 is full of endings that do not yet know themselves to be endings. Revolutions begin that will run for decades. Artforms crack open and become something new. Dictatorships fall. Centuries of monarchy dissolve in a single October night. A comet passes, and a great American writer dies the following morning, having predicted exactly this. The year does not announce what it is doing. It simply does it — quietly, all at once, everywhere.
Part I: Death of Certainty
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov died in June 1908. Stravinsky was twenty-six years old. He had spent three years studying under the older composer twice a week, often staying for dinner, coming to regard him as a second father. When the teacher died, Stravinsky wrote a Funeral Song in his honor, performed once and then lost for over a century. Then he set to work on what would come next.
What came next was an audition. In January 1909, Stravinsky's Scherzo Fantastique was performed in St. Petersburg. In the audience was Sergei Diaghilev — impresario, exile, ringmaster of the Ballets Russes, the company he had founded to bring Russian art to Paris and Paris to its knees. The Ballets Russes was a Russian company that had never performed in Russia — Diaghilev's entire operation was built on the proposition that Paris was where Russian art would find its audience, and where that audience would be transformed by it. Diaghilev heard something in the young composer's work and commissioned him to orchestrate some Chopin for the 1909 season. Then, planning 1910, he wanted something larger: a full original ballet score on the subject of the Firebird, a creature from Russian folklore whose feathers bring both fortune and doom.
He had asked several more established composers first. All of them declined or fell through. Stravinsky was, in a sense, the last option — young, untested, and for that reason almost certainly willing to say yes on short notice. He was right. Stravinsky put aside the opera he was working on and began immediately, composing what he later described as music that paid homage to his teacher and moved beyond him at the same time: Rimsky-Korsakov's harmonic language in the service of something stranger, with moments of genuine modernism pressing through the familiar orchestral surface.
The premiere was on June 25, 1910, at the Paris Opéra. It was a sensation. The twenty-seven-year-old Stravinsky was famous overnight. He would follow the Firebird with Petrushka in 1911, then The Rite of Spring in 1913 — the work that would produce a near-riot and reorient music entirely. The Firebird was the first step: a piece that still speaks the language of one era while already dreaming in another.
Five months later, on the other side of the Channel, something stranger still.
Roger Fry was an art critic, a painter of middling talent, and a man with an evangelical certainty about what mattered. He had spent years writing about Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse — painters largely unknown to the British public, who still took their aesthetic cues from the Royal Academy and its preference for the representational and the heroic. When the Grafton Galleries in London found themselves with an unexpected vacancy in November 1910, Fry seized it. He traveled to France, chose works from dealers, and assembled an exhibition he titled Manet and the Post-Impressionists — a phrase he coined on the spot because no existing term covered the territory.
Two hundred and twenty-eight works. Twenty-one Cézannes, twenty-two Van Goghs, forty-six Gauguins, twenty-two Matisses, a Picasso. Over twenty-five thousand visitors in two months. And a reception that can only be described as controlled hysteria. The critic for the Pall Mall Gazette called the paintings the output of a lunatic asylum. Londoners had gone to be amused, and many of them were — but underneath the laughter was something sharper, a sense that the ground had shifted. These canvases did not represent the world. They interrogated it. They refused the stable, reassuring transaction between painter and viewer that Victorian art had made into a moral compact.
Virginia Woolf would later write — carefully, deliberately — that in or about December 1910, human character changed. The date was not accidental. She was pointing at the Grafton exhibition and its aftershocks, at the moment the British public was forced into contact with a way of seeing that made the familiar strange. But the Post-Impressionists she was writing about — Cézanne dead in 1906, Van Gogh dead in 1890, Gauguin dead in 1903 — were themselves already history by the time the Grafton show opened. In Paris, Picasso and Braque were midway through the invention of Cubism. The exhibition was Britain finally arriving at a party that had already moved on to the next room.
But arrival matters. For the twenty-five thousand people who walked through those doors, something ended: the long confidence that art's job was to show the world as it was, arranged prettily, without asking too many questions. In Paris that summer, a twenty-seven-year-old had written his teacher's language into something new. In London that winter, a public was confronted with paintings by dead men that nonetheless felt like the future. The old forms weren't abandoned. They were made strange. And strangeness, once it enters a room, is very difficult to remove.
Part II: Death of a Kingdom
To understand what ended in Portugal in October 1910, you have to go back twenty years. In January 1890, Britain delivered an ultimatum to the Portuguese government: withdraw your military forces from the territory between Angola and Mozambique, land Portugal had claimed as a corridor connecting its two great African colonies, or face the consequences. Portugal had no navy capable of resisting. It capitulated almost immediately. The humiliation was total — made worse by the fact that Britain was Portugal's oldest ally, bound by the Treaty of Windsor since 1386. The national anthem that Portugal adopted in those years, A Portuguesa, was written in direct response to the ultimatum, its lyrics soaked in the language of wounded pride.
The monarchy never recovered its moral authority. For the republicans who had been gathering strength for decades, the capitulation was proof of what they had argued all along: the Braganza dynasty was a symbol of national decline, incapable of defending the country's dignity or its empire. Over the following twenty years they built their movement methodically — press campaigns, secret societies, sympathetic cells in the military. The monarchy, meanwhile, lurched through a succession of unstable governments, fiscal crises, and short-lived prime ministers, none of them able to answer the fundamental question of what Portugal was for.
Then came the afternoon of February 1, 1908.
King Carlos I and his family were returning to Lisbon from a winter hunting stay at Vila Viçosa. They crossed the Tagus by ferry and climbed into an open landau for the final stretch to the palace. Even in a climate of evident political tension, the king had chosen an open carriage — dressed in his uniform as Generalíssimo, projecting normality. The carriage entered the Terreiro do Paço, the great riverside square that opens onto the Tagus, with its colonnaded arcades and its statue of King José I on horseback at the center. There were few people in the square that winter afternoon.
A man emerged from behind the carriage, knelt, and fired. King Carlos was struck in the neck and killed instantly. The crown prince, Luís Filipe, was fatally wounded trying to shield his family and died within the hour. Queen Amélie fought off a second assassin with a bouquet of flowers. The youngest son, eighteen-year-old Manuel, was hit in the arm but survived. Within days he was king — the last king of Portugal, though he could not have known it.
Manuel II reigned for two years and eight months. He was a young man with no preparation for the throne and no illusions about his position. He understood that his father's direct involvement in politics had contributed to his death, and so he pulled back, tried to govern constitutionally, cycled through prime ministers, attempted conciliation with the republicans. Nothing worked. The ground had been shifting since 1890. The regicide had only accelerated it, demonstrating — as one observer noted — that kings could be killed, that the monarchy was not divinely protected or politically untouchable.
On the night of October 3, 1910, the uprising began. Nearly two thousand soldiers and sailors joined the rebellion over the following two days. The republicans cut telegraph lines, severed railway tracks to prevent royalist troops from reaching Lisbon, and took control of the Tagus with warships. On October 4, two of those warships turned their guns on the royal palace. Manuel II and the royal family fled to Britain. The army, finding itself unable and unwilling to fight, capitulated.
At nine o'clock on the morning of October 5, the republic was proclaimed from the balcony of Lisbon's City Hall. Eight centuries of Portuguese monarchy — the Burgundians, the Avis, the Habsburgs, the Braganzas — ended in the course of a single overnight. The new provisional government moved immediately: the church was separated from the state, titles of nobility were abolished, clerical property was nationalized. The republic that emerged was fractious, unstable, prone to its own coups and counter-coups. But what was over was over. The Braganza dynasty, already mortally wounded in the Terreiro do Paço two years earlier, had finally fallen.
Part III: Death of an Era
They called Los Angeles "Otistown of the Open Shop." The name came from Harrison Gray Otis, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, a man who had spent two decades converting his newspaper into something closer to a weapon. Otis was not merely anti-union in the way that many businessmen of the era were anti-union — cautiously, strategically, out of financial interest. He was anti-union the way a general is anti-enemy: absolutely, publicly, with the full force of his editorial page deployed against any attempt by workers to organize in his city. His building on First and Broadway had a nickname: the Fortress. It looked and acted the part.
By the summer of 1910, Los Angeles was a battleground. In June, fifteen hundred ironworkers walked off the job, joined by members of half a dozen other unions. A judge enjoined strikers from picketing; the city council endorsed the injunction; police arrested four hundred and seventy-two strikers who picketed anyway. Otis and his business allies raised a $350,000 war chest. The Times kept hammering. Bombs began appearing — first a fake, a rusty watch strapped to a pipe, clearly a warning; then a real one at the Hall of Records.
At one o'clock in the morning on October 1, James McNamara's timing device activated in the alley behind the Times building. The south wall collapsed. The second floor came down under the weight of its machinery. The first floor fell into the basement, rupturing the heating plant and the gas mains. Workers trapped inside the building burned. Twenty-one people died. More than a hundred were injured. Otis called it the crime of the century and blamed organized labor before dawn.
He was right about the perpetrators, though labor wouldn't believe it for over a year. The McNamara brothers — John, the union's secretary-treasurer, and James, the foot soldier — were arrested the following April. Clarence Darrow took their defense, raised on a tide of union solidarity and public sympathy. Then, in November 1911, the brothers pleaded guilty. The labor movement, which had staked its credibility on their innocence, was devastated. Los Angeles would remain one of the most hostile cities in America to organized labor for decades.
The bombing was the sharpest expression of a tension running through the entire country that year: the question of who the economy was for, and what methods were permissible in contesting that question. It had a quieter, more procedural twin in Washington, where a dispute between two cabinet officials was cracking the Republican Party along exactly the same fault line.
Gifford Pinchot had been Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester — the man who had helped design the conservation policy that was one of the genuine achievements of the Roosevelt years: millions of acres of public land protected from private exploitation. When Roosevelt's chosen successor, William Howard Taft, took office in 1909, Pinchot stayed on. But Taft's new Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, was moving in the opposite direction — opening Alaskan coal lands to private interests, reversing what Roosevelt had built. Pinchot, a close personal friend of Roosevelt's, went public. In January 1910, he sent an open letter to a sympathetic senator, read into the congressional record, praising a whistle-blower and rebuking the president. Taft fired him immediately.
The congressional hearings that followed ran through the spring. Ballinger was ultimately cleared, but the damage was done. Roosevelt, returning from an African safari, concluded that Taft had betrayed everything the previous administration had stood for. The friendship between the two men — the heir and the patron — was finished. The Republican Party's progressive and conservative wings, already straining, began to separate. In 1912, Roosevelt would run against Taft on the Bull Moose ticket, splitting the vote and handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. It all traced back to a dispute about Alaskan coal lands, and what public resources were for, and who got to decide.
Three thousand miles away, a different question about who America was for was finding its first institutional answer. The NAACP had formally adopted its name and structure at its second conference in May 1910, incorporated in New York with a board of directors and a white constitutional lawyer, Moorfield Storey, as its president. W.E.B. Du Bois — the only Black board member, and the organization's most formidable intellect — was named director of research and publications. In November he launched The Crisis, the NAACP's monthly magazine, with an editorial promising to document the danger of race prejudice as it manifested toward colored people in America. The first issue sold out.
The NAACP's first legal case had already begun. Pink Franklin was a Black sharecropper in South Carolina who had left his employer after receiving a wage advance — which under the state's peonage laws constituted a criminal offense. Armed policemen arrived at his cabin before dawn without identifying themselves. In the gun battle that followed, one officer was killed. Franklin was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court ruled against him in May 1910. The NAACP appealed to the governor of South Carolina, who commuted the sentence to life in prison. Franklin would be freed in 1919.
It was not a victory. It was the barest mitigation of an outcome that should never have been possible — a man facing death for leaving a job. But the organization had acted, had found the case, had pushed it, had extracted what it could. Du Bois, covering the Franklin case in the first issues of The Crisis, understood what it represented: not a triumph, but a beginning. A structure now existed, with a magazine and a board and a mandate, to fight this case and the next one and the one after that. In a year full of endings, it was one of the few things that had just started.
Part IV: Death of a Dictatorship
Porfirio Díaz had been president of Mexico for thirty-four years. He had come to power in 1876 on the slogan of no reelection and had been reelecting himself ever since. Under his rule — El Porfiriato, they called it, as though the man and the era were interchangeable — Mexico had been modernized with ferocious efficiency: railroads built, foreign investment welcomed, an international debt repaid. Order and Progress was the regime's official motto, borrowed from French positivism. There was order. There was a version of progress. What there was not, for the overwhelming majority of Mexicans, was any share in it.
By 1910, most of the land in Mexico had become the property of a few thousand large landowners. At least ninety-five percent of the rural population — some ten million people — owned no land. About five thousand indigenous communities that had held land since before the Spanish conquest had been expropriated, their inhabitants converted into laborers on the haciendas. Díaz had permitted public lands to be transferred to private ownership at negligible prices with no limit on acreage; the results were predictable and intentional. The hacienda system that resulted was not a remnant of the colonial past but an active creation of the Porfiriato, engineered to produce cheap labor for an export economy that benefited foreign investors and the domestic elite. Ordinary Mexicans imported their corn because the haciendas had converted subsistence land to cash crops.
The dictator's mistake was an interview. In 1908, Díaz sat down with the American journalist James Creelman for Pearson's Magazine and announced — to a foreign readership, perhaps assuming the words wouldn't circulate back home — that he would not seek another term in the 1910 election. Mexico was ready for democracy, he said. He would welcome an opposition. "No matter what my friends and supporters say," Díaz told Creelman, "I shall not serve again." He was almost eighty years old.
The words detonated across Mexico. Whatever Díaz's intentions — and historians have debated whether it was sincerity, image management, or a trap to flush out opponents — the effect was the same: for the first time in a generation, political activity became possible. Francisco Madero, a slight, bookish idealist from a wealthy landowning family in Coahuila, took the opening seriously. He wrote a book criticizing the Díaz administration, founded an Anti-Reelection Party, and launched a presidential campaign on the slogan that any schoolchild could understand: sufragio efectivo, no reelección — effective suffrage and no reelection. He toured the country, drew crowds, became genuinely dangerous.
In June 1910, Díaz had him arrested. Five thousand of Madero's followers were arrested alongside him. The election proceeded without serious opposition, and Díaz declared himself the winner by a margin that suggested the votes had not been closely counted. Madero, released on bail, fled to San Antonio, Texas.
From exile he wrote the Plan de San Luis Potosí — a manifesto declaring the election fraudulent, proclaiming himself provisional president, and calling on the Mexican people to rise up in arms. He set a precise time: six o'clock in the evening on November 20, 1910. He crossed back to the border, ready to lead his revolution.
Almost no one came.
Madero stood at the Rio Grande with a handful of men and no army and retreated back to the United States, apparently convinced the whole thing had failed. But the Plan de San Luis Potosí had been secretly distributed across a country full of people with thirty-four years of grievances, and what looked like failure from the border looked different from Chihuahua, from Morelos, from the mining towns and the haciendas and the mountains. In the north, a former bandit and cattle rustler named Pancho Villa was already moving. In the south, a village leader from Morelos named Emiliano Zapata, who had spent years watching his community's land stripped away by neighboring haciendas, had heard the call and answered it in his own way, on his own terms, with his own demands that went considerably further than Madero's.
The revolution Madero imagined was a political one — fraudulent elections corrected, a dictator removed, democracy restored. The revolution that actually started on November 20, 1910 was something larger and less controllable: a decade-long convulsion that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives, produce a constitution that became a model for social rights movements across Latin America, and fundamentally remake the relationship between the Mexican state and the land. Madero would become president in 1911 and be assassinated in 1913. Díaz would die in Paris in 1915, in exile, having fled the country he had dominated for most of his adult life.
But in November 1910, standing at the border with no army, the only thing that had definitively ended was the Porfiriato's long pretense that nothing needed to change. The alarm clock Madero had wound up was running. He just couldn't hear it yet.
Coda: Death of an Author
Halley’s Comet had been coming for months before anyone could see it. Astronomers at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin had been tracking it since February, when they announced — carefully, factually — that spectroscopic analysis had detected cyanogen gas in its tail. The announcement was careful. The reception was not. A French astronomer named Camille Flammarion told the press that the cyanogen might impregnate the atmosphere and snuff out all life on the planet. Other scientists offered other catastrophes: a barrage of X-rays, a flood that would make Noah's look modest. Newspapers ran the predictions without the caveats. Entrepreneurs began selling anti-comet pills, gas masks, and bottles of pure air. Women stuffed cloth into their door frames. Coal miners in Pennsylvania refused to go underground. Some people threw end-of-the-world parties. Others simply waited.
On May 6, with the comet bright in the sky, King Edward VII died in his bed. The papers noted the coincidence. On May 18, Earth passed through the comet's tail. Nothing happened. The cyanogen, as calmer scientists had been saying for weeks, was present in quantities too trace to register. The Plain Dealer ran a headline the next morning: Cyanogen gas seems to bear a close resemblance to ordinary hot air. The end-of-the-world parties became ordinary parties. The gas masks went back in the closet.
But April 21 — a month before the closest approach, the day after perihelion — Mark Twain died of a heart attack at his home in Redding, Connecticut. He was seventy-four years old. He had predicted it himself, the year before, in the way that only he could have predicted it: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
He had not been well. His wife Olivia had died in 1904. His youngest daughter Jean had died suddenly on Christmas Eve 1909, four months before him. The final years had darkened considerably from the public figure — the white suit, the irascible wit, the honorary degrees from Yale and Oxford — into something more private and more bleak. His last completed piece of writing was a short humorous sketch called "Etiquette for the Afterlife." He was a man who kept working, kept making jokes, right to the edge.
Hemingway would later write that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Whatever one makes of that claim — and it overstates, as Hemingway usually did — it locates something real. Twain had invented a vernacular for American fiction: the voice of a boy on a raft, morally confused and instinctively decent, moving through a country that talked about freedom and practiced its opposite. That voice — irreverent, direct, always half a step ahead of the pieties of the age — had no real precedent and produced a direct lineage. When he died, the nineteenth century lost its last great American voice.
The comet moved on. It will return in 2061.
Halley’s Comet follows its orbit. It appeared in 1835 when a boy named Samuel Clemens was born in Missouri, and it appeared in 1910 when the old world was coming apart at its seams, and it will appear again whether or not anyone is watching. Against all the year's endings — a king, an aesthetic order, a kingdom, an era, a dictatorship, an author — the comet moves through the solar system on its own schedule, indifferent to thrones and revolutions and the particular anxieties of any given century.
1910 ends, then. A year of funerals for things that had seemed permanent: the confidence of European monarchies, the assumption that art would always represent the world as it was, the long tenure of a dictator who had outlasted his own usefulness, the reign of an era named after a man who smoked twelve cigars a day and called himself a peacemaker. What replaces all of it is not yet visible from here.