Showing posts with label 1770s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1770s. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2024

Friday, March 18, 1774. Lord North goofs.


Lord Frederick North introduced the Boston Port Act to the House of Commons.  The proposed act stated:

Parliament of Great Britain

Anno Decimo Quarto Georgii III. Regis.

An Act to discontinue in such Manner, and for such Time as are therein mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading or shipping, of Goods, Wares, and Merchandise, at the Town and within the Harbour of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in North America.

Whereas dangerous commotions and insurrections have been fomented and raised in the town of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England, by divers ill-affected persons, to the subversion of his Majesty's Government, and to the utter destruction of the public peace, and good order of the said town; in which commotions and insurrections certain valuable cargoes of teas, being the property of the East India Company, and on board certain vessels lying within the bay or harbour of Boston, were seized and destroyed: and whereas in the present condition of the said town and harbour, the commerce of his Majesty's subjects cannot be safely carried on there, nor the Customs payable to his Majesty duly collected; and it is therefore expedient that the officers of his Majesty's Customs should be forthwith removed from the said town; may it please you Majesty that it may be enacted, and be it enacted by the King's most excellent Majesty, by and with the advise and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, that from and after the first day of June, 1774, it shall not be lawful for any person or persons whatsoever, to lade or put, or cause or procure to be laden or put, off or from any quay, wharf, or other place, within the said town of Boston, or in or upon any part of the shore of the bay, commonly called the Harbour of Boston, between a certain headland or point, called Nahant Point, on the eastern side of the entrance into the said bay, and a certain headland or point called Alderton Point, on the western side of the entrance into the said bay, or in or upon any island, creek, landing place, bank, or other place, within the said bay, or headlands, into any ship, vessel, lighter, boat, or bottom, any goods, wares, or merchandise, whatsoever, to be transported or carried into any other country, province, or place, whatsoever, or into any other part of the said Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England; or to take up, discharge, or lay on land, or cause or procure to be taken up, discharged, or laid on land, within the said town, or in or upon any of the places aforesaid, out of any boat, lighter, ship, vessel, or bottom, any goods, wares, or merchandise, whatsoever, to be brought from any other country, province, or place, or any other part of the said Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England, upon the pain of forfeiture of the said goods, wares, and merchandise, and of the said boat, lighter, ship, vessel, or other bottom, into which the same shall be put, or out of which the same shall be taken, and of the guns, ammunition, tackle, furniture, and stores, in or belonging to the same; and if any such goods, wares, or merchandise, shall within the said town, or in any the places aforesaid, be laden or taken in from the shore into any barge, hoy, lighter, wherry, or boat, to be carried on board any ship or vessel outward bound to any other country or province, or other part of said Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England, or be laden or taken into such barge, hoy, lighter, wherry, or out of any ship or vessel coming and arriving from any other country or province, or other part of the said Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England, such barge, hoy, lighter, wherry, or boat, shall be forfeited and lost.

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any wharfinger, or keeper of any wharf, crane, or quay, or their servants, or any of them, shall take up or land, or knowingly suffer to be taken up or landed, or shall ship off, or suffer to be waterborne, at or from any of the aforesaid wharfs, cranes, or quays, any such goods, wares, or merchandise; in every such case, all and every such wharfinger, and keeper of such wharf, crane, or quay, and every person whatsoever who shall be assisting, or otherwise concerned in the shipping or in the loading or putting on board any boat or other vessel, for that purpose, or in the unshipping such goods, wares, and merchandise, or to whose hands the same shall knowingly come after the loading, shipping or unshipping thereof, shall forfeit and lose treble the value thereof, to be computed at the highest price which such sort of goods, wares, and merchandise, shall bear at the place where such offence shall be committed, at the time when the same shall be so committed, together with the vessel and boats, and all the horses, cattle and carriages, whatsoever made use of in the shipping, unshipping, landing, removing, carriage, or conveyance of any of the aforesaid goods, wares, and merchandise.

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any ship or vessel shall be moored or lie at anchor, or be seen hovering within the said bay, described and bounded as aforesaid, or within one league from the said bay so described, or the said headlands, or any of the islands lying between or within the same, it shall and may be lawful for any Admiral, Chief Commander, or commissioned officer, of his Majesty's fleet or ships of war, or for any officer of his Majesty's customs, to compel such ship or vessel to depart to some other port or harbour, or to such station as the said officer shall appoint, and to use such force for that purpose as shall be found necessary: and if such ship or vessel shall not depart accordingly, within six hours after notice for that purpose given by such person as aforesaid, such ship or vessel, together with all the goods laden on board thereon, and all the guns, ammunition, tackle and furniture, shall he forfeited and lost, whether bulk shall have been broken or not.

Provided always, That nothing in this Act contained shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any military or other stores for his Majesty's use, or to the ships or vessels whereon the same shall be laden, which shall be commissioned by, and in the immediate pay of, his Majesty, his heirs and successors: nor to any fuel or victual brought coastways from any part of the Continent of America, for the necessary use and sustenance of the inhabitants of the said town of Boston: provided the vessel wherein the same are to be carried, shall be duly furnished with a cocket and let-pass, after having been duly searched by the proper officers of his Majesty's customs at Marblehead, in the port of Salem, in the said Province of Massachusetts Bay; and the same officer of his Majesty's Customs be also put on board the said vessel, who is hereby authorized to go on board, and proceed with the said vessel, together with a sufficient number of persons, properly armed, for his defence, to the said town or harbour of Boston; nor to any ships or vessels which may happen to be within the said harbour of Boston, on or before the the first day of June, 1774, and may have either laden or taken on board, or be there with intent to load or take on board, or to land or discharge any goods, wares, and merchandise, provided the said ships and vessels do depart the said harbour within fourteen days after the first day of June, 1774.

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That all seizures, penalties, and forfeitures, inflicted by this Act, shall be made and prosecuted by any Admiral, Chief Commander, or commissioned officer, of his Majesty's fleet, or ships of war, or by the officers of his Majesty's Customs, or some of them, or by some other person deputed or authorized, by warrant from the Lord High Treasurer, or the Commissioners of his Majesty's Treasury, for the time being, and by no other person whatsoever; and if any such officer, or other person authorized as aforesaid, shall directly or indirectly, take or receive any bribe or reward, or connive at such lading or unlading, or shall make or commence any collusive seizure, information, or agreement, for that purpose, or shall do any other act whatsoever, whereby the goods, wares, or merchandise, prohibited as aforesaid, shall be suffered to pass either inwards or outwards, or whereby the forfeitures and penalties inflicted by this Act may be evaded, every such offender shall forfeit the sum of five hundred pounds for every such offence, and shall become incapable of any office or employment, civil or military; and every person who shall give, offer, or promise, any such bribe or reward, or shall contract, agree, or treat with, any person, so authorized as aforesaid, to commit any such offence, shall forfeit the sum of fifty pounds.

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the forfeitures and penalties inflicted by this Act shall and may be prosecuted, sued for, and recovered, and be divided, paid, and applied, in like manner, as other penalties and forfeitures inflicted by any Act or Acts of Parliament, relating to the trade or revenues of the British Colonies, or Plantations in America, are directed to be prosecuted, sued for, or recovered, divided, paid and applied, by two several Acts of Parliament, the one passed in the fourth year of his present Majesty, intituled "An Act for granting certain Duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America; for continuing, amending, and making perpetual, an Act, passed in the sixth year of the Reign of his late Majesty King George the Second, intituled, An Act for the better securing and encouraging trade of his Majesty's Sugar Colonies in America; for applying the produce of such duties, and of the duties to arise by virtue of the said Act, towards defraying the expense of defending, protecting, and securing, the said Colonies and Plantations; for explaining an Act made in the twenty-fifth year of the Reign of King Charles the Second, intituled, An Act for the encouragement of the Greenland and Eastland Trades, and for the better securing the Plantation Trade; and for altering and disallowing several drawbacks on exports from this Kingdom, and more effectually preventing the clandestine conveyance of goods to, and from, the said Colonies and Plantations, and improving and securing the trade between the same and Great Britain;" the other passed in the eighth year of his present Majesty's Reign, intituled, "An Act for the more easy and effectual recovery of the penalties and forfeitures inflicted by the Acts of Parliament, relating to the trade or revenues of the British Colonies and Plantations in America."

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That every charter party bill of loading, and other contract, for consigning, shipping, or carrying any goods, wares, and merchandise, whatsoever, to or from the said town of Boston, or any part of the bay or harbour thereof, described as aforesaid, which have been made or entered into, or which shall be made or entered into, so long as this Act shall remain in full force, relating to any ship which shall arrive at the said town or harbour, after the first day of June, 1774, shall be, and the same an hereby declared to be, utterly void, to all intents and purposes whatsoever.

And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That whenever it shall be made to appear to his Majesty, in his Privy Council, that peace and obedience to the laws shall be so far restored in the said town of Boston, that the trade of Great Britain may be safely carried on there, and his Majesty's customs duly collected, and his Majesty, in his Privy Council, shall adjudge the same to be true, it shall and may be lawful for his Majesty, by Proclamation, or Order of Council, to assign and appoint the extent, bounds and limits, of the port or harbour of Boston, and of every creek or haven within the same, or in the islands within the precinct thereof; and also to assign and appoint such and so many open places, quays, and wharfs, within the said harbour, creeks, havens, and islands, for the landing, discharging, lading, and shipping of goods, as his Majesty, his heirs, or successors, shall judge necessary and expedient; and also to appoint such and so many officers of the Customs therein, as his Majesty shall think fit; after which it shall be lawful for any person or persons to lade or put off from, or to discharge and land upon, such wharfs, quays, and places, so appointed, within the said harbour, and none other, any goods, wares, and merchandise, whatsoever.

Provided always, That if any goods, wares or merchandise, shall be laden or put off from, or discharged or landed upon, any other place than the quays, wharfs, or places, so to be appointed, the same, together with the ships, boats, and other vessels employed therein, and the horses, or other cattle and carriages used to convey the same, and the person or persons concerned or assisting therein, or to whose hands the same shall knowingly come, shall suffer all the forfeitures and penalties imposed by this or any other Act on the illegal shipping or landing of goods.

Provided also, And it is hereby declared and enacted, that nothing herein contained shall extend or be construed, to enable his Majesty to appoint such port, harbour, creeks, quays, wharfs, places, or officers, in the said town of Boston, or in the said bay or islands, until it shall sufficiently appear to his Majesty, that full satisfaction hath been made by or on behalf of the inhabitants of the said town of Boston, to the United Company of merchants of England, trading to the East Indies, for the damages sustained by the said Company, bv the destruction of their goods sent to the said town of Boston, on board certain ships or vessels, as aforesaid; and until it shall be certified to his Majesty, in Council, by the Governor, or Lieutenant Governor, of the said Province, that reasonable satisfaction hath been made to the officers of his Majesty's Revenue and others, who suffered by the riots and insurrections above mentioned, in the months of November and December, in the year 1773, and in the month of January, in the year 1774.

And be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid, That if any action or suit shall be commenced, either in Great Britain or America, against any person or persons, for any thing done in pursuance of this Act of Parliament, the defendant or defendants, in such action or suits, may plead the general issue, and give the said Act, and the special matter in evidence, at any trial to be had thereupon, and that the same was done in pursuance and by the authority of this Act; and if it shall appear so to have been done, the jury shall find for the defendant or defendants; and if the plaintiff shall be nonsuited, or discontinue his action, after the defendant or defendants shall have appeared; or if judgment shall be given upon any verdict or demurrer against the plaintiff, the defendant or defendants shall recover treble costs, and have the like remedy for the same as defendents have in other cases by law.

It would pass on the 25th, and help propel the Colonies into war against the United Kingdom. 

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Monday, August 30, 1943. Hornets

CV-12, the second aircraft carrier of World War Two to be named the USS Hornet, was launched.

CV-12 being launched.

CV-8, the USS Hornet that had been in the Doolittle Raid, was sunk in October, 1942.

CV-12 was the eighth U.S. Navy ship to bear that name, the first being a merchant sloop acquired by the infant U.S. Navy in 1775 and captured by the Royal Navy during the Revolution.  A second USS Hornet, also a sloop, was acquired in the Mediterranean during the First Barbary War, but served for only a year.

CV-8 was named in honor of a sloop of war commissioned in 1805.  She's served in the War of 1812, but had been lost due to a material failure at sea in 1829, going down with all hands.

The foundering of CV-8's namesake.

The fourth was a schooner acquired in 1814 that mostly served the Navy by running messages.

The fifth ship to bear that name was a captured and renamed Confederate steam ship.  Its career with the US Navy was brief, and she then went on to a brief career with filibusters, being renamed Cuba.


The Red Army captured Sokolovskym Yelna, and Taganrog.

In his second act of heroism, Lt. Kenneth Walsh, would push his deeds over the top as a Marine Corp aviator and win the Medal of Honor.  His citation reads:
For extraordinary heroism and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty as a pilot in Marine Fighting Squadron 124 in aerial combat against enemy Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands area. Determined to thwart the enemy's attempt to bomb Allied ground forces and shipping at Vella Lavella on 15 August 1943, 1st Lt. Walsh repeatedly dived his plane into an enemy formation outnumbering his own division 6 to 1 and, although his plane was hit numerous times, shot down 2 Japanese dive bombers and 1 fighter. After developing engine trouble on 30 August during a vital escort mission, 1st Lt. Walsh landed his mechanically disabled plane at Munda, quickly replaced it with another, and proceeded to rejoin his flight over Kahili. Separated from his escort group when he encountered approximately 50 Japanese Zeros, he unhesitatingly attacked, striking with relentless fury in his lone battle against a powerful force. He destroyed 4 hostile fighters before cannon shellfire forced him to make a dead-stick landing off Vella Lavella where he was later picked up. His valiant leadership and his daring skill as a flier served as a source of confidence and inspiration to his fellow pilots and reflect the highest credit upon the U.S. Naval Service.

Lt. Walsh had joined the Marine Corps in 1933 and retired in 1962, flying again in action during the Korean War.  He died at age 81 in 1998. 

The Lackawanna Limited wreck occurred when a Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad passenger train, the New York-Buffalo Lackawanna Limited collided with a freight train. Twenty-seven people were killed in the collision, and about twice that number injured, many from steam that poured into the railroad cars.




Friday, December 23, 2022

“Zelenskyy was all rumpled and not wearing a suit, very disrespectful.”

George Washington as Commander of the Continental Army, in the same style of uniform as he wore at the Second Continental Congress in 1775.  Shocking.

Eh?

Did I hear that right?

Are Americans suddenly criticizing the dress of somebody appearing at a public function?

Oh yes, they are, and some are truly verklempt, or appearing to be.  Consider Newsmax's Benny Johnson:

This ungrateful piece of sh*t does not have the decency to wear a suit to the White House -- no respect the country that is funding his survival.

Track suit wearing eastern european con-man mafia.

Our leaders fell for it. They have disgraced us all. What an incredible insult.

Oh my. An American criticizing somebody for how they dress.  It's almost impossible to imagine.

I'm stunned.

I've commented on the decline on the dressing standard here quite a few times.  And I do generally think that appearing in front of Congress, and being at Congress, should require formal dress.  

And not just there, I'd note.

I don't know that I think that required of a man whose living under siege and who is a wartime leader of a country whose capital is within rocket range of what was thought, up until a few months ago, to potentially have the first or second most powerful military on earth.

Indeed, any rational observer of American dress has to know that Americans, generally, dress like slobs.  Quite a few dress like children all the time.  People toddle around in public markets dressed like their mothers just got them up for an early morning trip to the store in their pj's.  People board planes in jammies.  Some men wear knee pants all the time, even during the winter, choosing to affect a dashing infantile presentation in the worst weather.

And more than that, people appear at official functions poorly dressed all the time.

When I was first practicing law, as I noted here before, I didn't really have to tell witnesses how to dress in court.  A while later, however, I'd get asked, and when asked I'd use the Protestant term "Sunday Best", even though I'm not a Protestant, as everyone knew what that meant.  Later, however, I found that was no longer the case and I started to get lucky if people had a clean shirt.

The summer before last I tried a case in Denver in which a downtown Denver jury came in extremely informal clothing.  Shorts, t-shirts, etc.  Only the lawyers, the court staff, and the judge dressed up to the old standard.  A couple of decades ago, this would not have occurred.

Just recently I attended a multiple day contested case hearing in which the lawyers were no longer wearing ties, something that would be a defacto breach of the old official standard that applied to us when we were first practicing.  And I mean the latter.  Ties were part of the official rules for male lawyers up until the time I started practicing, and they basically remain that for courtroom attire.

No, not me, I wore jacket and tie every day.

The panel hearing the matter wore formal clothes, however.  Most of the lawyers, most of the time, did not.  Not that they'd gone full informal, they were still wearing dress shirts and jackets, but no ties.

This is becoming increasingly common.

During the recent January 6 hearings, many of the witnesses fell well below what we would have regarded as the old standard.  Not so low as the rioters, however, who were largely dressed down to the American standard.

I'd include in that dressing down, I'd note, the MAGA trucker's hat.  

I'm not a trucker's cap fan, for the most part, anyhow, with some exceptions.  I will wear real baseball caps from real baseball teams.  Baseball caps, however, are actually not baseball caps, which have longer bills, but an evolution of them that has looked bad from day one.  Thanks to the MAGA cap, now you see guys wearing sports coats and MAGA caps, which looks dumb.

Okay, I suppose we might ask if this is unprecedented?  I truly don't know.

What I can say is that Zelenskyy is a wartime leader. When he was a peacetime leader, he favored dark suits, and was clean-shaven.  Starting with the Russian invasion of his country, and the fighting in his own capital, he began to dress in a quasi military fashion.

He's not the first leader of a democratic country to do that.  I'll omit non-democratic ones, as their leaders affecting military style dress is extremely common.

The best example is Winston Churchill who dressed eclectically frequently.  We like to remember him dressed to the English standard, suit and bowler, but in actuality as he grew older he favored jumpsuits.  In his visits to see FDR he wore them quite frequently, and was photographed by the press wearing them due to their uniqueness.

Churchill, who had started off his professional life as a career British Army officer, but who had official roles with the Admiralty later on, really like to dress in quasi Naval attire, even while Prime Minister, including in official meetings with the heads of foreign states.


Indeed, he truly did.


George Bush, George Bush II, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all appeared at various times wearing various types of flight jackets, an unmistakenly military item. No, they didn't wear them in Congress, but they wore them.  The two Bush's had both seen military service, as pilots, but President Obama and President Trump never did.

And let's not forget George Washington.

Washington famously appeared in Congress, as a member of the Continental Congress, that assembled to take up the problems with the Mother Country, dressed in the blue uniform of the American Continental militia officers.  

We might regard that as formal wear, but that was the combat uniform of the time.  Our failure to appreciate that is probably due to our inability to read the clothing of the time, but in context, quite frankly, it's shocking.

And it is pretty much what Zalenskyy did earlier this week, save for the fact that he's the besieged president of an embattled country, whereas Washington was implying that maybe the colonies ought to rebel against their established sovereign.

Oh well. The standard is reestablished.  Trumpites, your call is clear.  Off to Brooks Brothers to suit up, literally.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946

Patrons of a bar and grill in Washington D.C. in 1943.  The man on the left is drinking a glass of beer, and it appears the woman is as well.  Also, fwiw, the man on the left is a Technician with a Corporal's grade, which during World War Two was an E3 grade, as opposed to Specialist and Corporals today, which hold an E4 grade.  The man on the right is an officer, so this is frankly likely a posed photograph.  All three people are smoking cigarettes.

Alcohol and the United States Army would make for an interesting small book  in no small part because the United States itself has had a love/hate relationship with alcohol.

Beer can, perhaps, be regarded as the American alcoholic beverage of choice, reflecting both the climate and geography of the nation, as well as the English founding of the country.  While not to put too fine of point on it, the English were armed Germanic immigrants in the 5th Century and some cultural things go way back.  Everywhere north of some line in modern France, if you consider Western Europe, beer is the alcoholic beverage.  South of that, it's wine.  All the Mediterranean people of the ancient world drank wine and in those areas of that region which are not now Islamic, they still do.  North of that line, at some point, they drank beer, although you can easily find beers going back to the ancient Egypt as well, although frankly the Egyptian climate was somewhat different at the time.

In the Medieval world, north of the beer line, beer was a staple.  South of it, wine was.  This isn't necessarily good, but basically the ills associated with any sort of alcohol were lower than those associated with plain water.  I'm not going to go into that, as its a bit more complicated than it might seem, but that's the case.

Before I move on. . . yes, there's hard alcohol and every region of the globe seems to produce some.  Whiskey is a Celtic thing and it goes way back in its own right.  But there are few people and were few people who simply drink hard alcohol routinely in the Western world, and in those regions were it is routinely consumed, it's destructive.  So, with that, we'll move on.

In the early Colonial era there was no big temperance movement of a wide societal basis.  Indeed, one of the oddities of history is that religious denominations that today argue against alcohol and which trace their origin to the Puritans, and not all make that trace, don't reflect back what the Puritans believed at all.  The Puritans were against a lot of things, to be sure, but they were fans of beer (and [marital] sex), so people remember them inaccurately.  But one did start to arise in North America by the mid 1700s in the form of Native American groups who urged it given the devastation that alcohol was causing in their cultures.  Indeed, they'd organized a temperance organization as early as 1737.  Coupled with this the popularity of gin in the early Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, which was a gross booze which could be manufactured cheaply, caused the movement to come about there as well.  

The early United States, however, was simply awash with alcohol and this, over time, gave force to the temperance movement, and by the mid 19th Century it was growing strong.

Issuing an alcohol ration is a strong military tradition in many armies, but reflecting the unique history of alcohol in the US, the tradition is much weaker in the U.S.  The American Navy, following the tradition of the Royal Navy, issued a Rum Ration, with Rum simply being any available hard alcohol, but in 1862 it abolished it.  In 1914, during the era in which Prohibition was coming on strong, the Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels completely banned alcohol in ships, meaning that the U.S. Navy went into World War One escort duties dry.  

The Army had an alcohol ration very early on.  Starting in 1775 Congress authorized soldiers an alcohol ration, and the ration was whiskey, in part reflecting a disruption of alcohol constituents that had been imported.  The is ration continued until 1832.  There was a separate spirts ration for military surveyors that continued on until the 1840s, but then it was also discontinued.

Since that time I don't know that there's ever been an alcohol ration in any branch of the military.  Indeed, the British discontinued their famous naval rum ration in the 1970s, so its likely disappeared or much less what it was everywhere.  The problem of obtaining clean water isn't what it once was, and its never been as big of problem in North America.  From the 1830s on soldiers could buy beer at post suttlers stores, but they were restricted in the amount they could buy.  I can't recall the restriction, but it was far below the amount you could drink and get drunk, which no doubt was the goal.  Of course, off base you could buy as much of anything as you might wish to, which is partially why saloons were a feature of every location with a frontier post.  Indeed, it was noted in the 19th Century that one of the problems of not having something like an Enlisted Man's Club, such as was later done, is that off post saloons were real dens of vice of all sorts.  Apparently this wasn't enough to motivate a change, but it was noted.  No alcohol ration was provided at any point through Prohibition.

This brings us to World War Two and this interesting item below, by Gary Gillman, a Toronto based beer blogger with an excellent blog entitled Beer, Et Seq.

U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946 (Part I)


I frankly don't know what was done beer wise from our point of entering the Second World War up through the end of the Vietnam War.  What is clear is that beer seems to have been provided on at least an ad hoc basis and therefore was a type of ration, even if on a somewhat informal basis.  Cigarettes had become one too, which had not been the case in World War One. The though likely was that you simply couldn't have that many people in uniform and not address such things, least they be addressed by the men themselves, which of course they also did.  Beer seems to have been provided on some basis in the Korean War and the Vietnam War as well, but not since then.  Indeed, recent wars in Islamic countries have been "dry", so to speak.

Anyhow, and interesting look at the US actually undertaking to brew beer during World War Two for servicemen's consumption.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Cooking Tech. How things have changed in the kitchen over the past two. . . or maybe three, centuries.

We've been taking a look at cooking and stoves here recently, getting back to more of the roots of this blog and its purpose.  

Frankly, we'd been remiss in doing that.  It's one of those areas that we should have explored, and in fact we did a little, but we didn't know, what we didn't know.  Or at least we didn't know it very well.

Back on August 8, 2009 (yes, this blog has been around that long, and actually as there's a prior variant of it, even longer than that), I posted an item here entitled The Speed of Cooking.  I'm resetting it out here:

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

Early posts here, as you can see, tended to be short.

Now, since that time I've also posted a major thread here on the revolution in the home, that became a revolution in the workplace, in the form of the advance of domestic machery;  That thread, which Iv'e linked into numerous others, is here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two


Post have grown in length, as you can also see.

Anyhow, given all of this, the ways that cooking has changed over what really amounts to a relatively short time frame should have occured to me.  And it sort of did, as I noted in this "Maytag" entry:

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.



Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.




Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

But nonetheless, it didn't really occur to me that the cast iron stoves of early 20th Century, and late 19th, were an innovation in and of themselves, nor did I really think much about what cooking was like before that.

The recent A Hundred Years Ago thread on igniting a coal stove caused me to ponder this and take a look at what that was somewhat like.

Somebody already has, of course, and in this very interesting Internet article:

Foodways in 1910

I just linked this in recently to another post here.  One of the things that's interesting to me about it, in an odd sort of way, is that its on a website that's sponsored by a woodburning cookstove manufacturer.  Frankly, looking into this pretty much convinces me that I want nothing to do with wood, or coal, burning stoves, but anyway.

It did not occur to me, as part of that cast iron stoves of all types are really a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.  But of course, they'd have to be.  It's not like average people are going to cast their own stoves.  So how far back do they really go. Well, that article gives us a pretty good look at that, noting:.
Most American homes did not have stoves until well into the 19th century, so cooking was done in an open hearth, using heavy iron pots and pans suspended from iron hooks and bars or placed on three-legged trivets to lift them above the fires. Pots and pans were made mostly of heavy cast iron. Along with long-handled spatulas and spoons, most kitchens featured long-handled gridirons to broil meat and toasting forks to hold slices of bread.
Though some women used Dutch ovens and some had clay ovens built outside, until after the Civil War when stoves with ovens became more common, people ate pancakes more often than bread. Because bread was hard to bake at home, most towns had bakeries. Bread was often the only prepared food that could be bought in town
That's a different type of cooking entirely.

And a different style of eating, for that matter.



Or, for those who use a cast iron frying pan alot, maybe not.



Well, anyhow. . .

Because it isn't all that long ago, it's one that we know a fair amount about, historically, even if we don't think about it much.   And due to reenactors of one kind or another, and historical sites that are accurate, we also can observe ir or even experience it if we wish to.  And thanks to the excellent Townsends series of vlogs about the late 1700s in North America, we can view the topic if we wish to.  Indeed, they've done a comparison and contrast edition of Colonial v. Modern kitchens, which is well worth looking at:



The part of this that's the real shocker, in my view, is the heath.  I.e., fires on bricks right in a house.

It's another one of those things I never would have thought of.

The video mentions smoke, which must have been a constant feature of life before modern stoves.  I've already mentioned the smoke from wood and coal burning stoves, but smoke from a hearth would be right in the house.    Life must have been. . . smokey.

And more than a little dangerous.

Before we move on, on that, we'll have to note cast iron here.  I love cast iron and indeed one of the additional "pages" on this blog is devoted to it.

Cast iron has been around for a long time, of course, but I frankly don't really know how long.  I can find references to it in Asia going way, way back.  At least 2,000 years.  It shows up for the first time in English in 679, but that use didn't refer to a cooking vessel, but a vessel of another type.  By 1170, however, it was showing up in references to cooking vessels.  The Dutch Oven was actually patented in 1708, later than I would have thought, however. At any rate, they've been around for awhile, and in their modern form are highly associated with sand casting, something that was coming in during the 17th Century.

There was obviously cooking in vessels before cast iron, but as this isn't the complete history of cooking from antiquity until the present day.  For the history we're concerned with, cast iron was undoubtedly the default cookware.  Indeed, it's well worth noting that Dutch Ovens were one of the most popular trade items with Indian tribes.  People think of guns, but cast iron was really valuable and rapidly became the Indian cookware of choice once it was available.

Anyhow, the important thing here is up until the Industrial Revolution really took hold, people cooked with fire in ovens and on hearths.  The fuel source was, according to the Townsends, whom I trust to get it right, wood or sometimes charcoal.  That would impact the type of cooking you'd do, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as I imagined as cooking over wood or charcoal does leave you a lot of options.

Cast iron stoves seem to have come in during the 1830s, as industry began to really change the average American's daily life.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that everyone had them overnight. They were expensive and, frankly, wouldn't have fit the way the average person's house had been built at the time.  Still, they may have come in pretty rapidly.  Just imagine what a revolution in cooking and simply life they meant.  No more building fires on the floor, for one thing, and that's a pretty big thing.  A fire that was more reliable, contained, and safe is another.

By 1900 coal was the main fuel for stoves and every family had one.  That was a big change over a period of time of less than a century.  By 1930, however, gas was replacing coal as the fuel for stoves, and no wonder.  It was cleaner and it didn't involve the constant endless cleaning that a coal stove did.  And for the first time some sort of heavy smoke didn't have to be contended with.

It's really gas stoves that brought in modern cooking.  Gas sped up cooking, for one thing, and it sped up the decision making process for meals as well.  Without  having to bank the stove and build the fire, and all of that, cooking, which had been an all day process was reduced down to one that was much less time consuming.  Electric stoves, which started to come in about the same time, accomplished the same thing.  Still, during the 1940s 1/3 of Americans still cooked with coal or wood, probably a partial effect of the Great Depression which slowed the introduction of new technology.  

Now, of course, hardly anyone does.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Today is Flag Day

June 14 is Flag Day, that date which honors the flag of the pattern we use, with the addition of course of stars, following its adoption by Congress in 1777.



With the country ripping itself apart, various groups using our differences against each other for their own purpose, and a society that's generally come about as close as it can to completely losing its moorings, before it loses its moorings, I bet little note will be taken of it.  It'd be easier today to have somebody burn that flag in protest or to wrap themselves in it in protest, than to find somebody to actually ponder and honor it.

The United States is a remarkable nation.  Not everything in its history is something we should be proud of, but much of it is, with its ideals as a republic, no matter how poorly realized from time to time, or ever, first among them.  We seem to live in a time in which only portions of those ideals, if any portion at all, is recognized by large sections of the nation.

Founded at a time when news traveled no faster than a horse, it's become a real question on whether a republic as large and diverse as ours can survive the age of idiotic Twitter, Facebook, and Electronic news.  The nation hardly even seems to have the energy to recognize itself as one to a large extent.  If a person's view was limited to what we're seeing currently today, a betting man wouldn't give it good odds for survival. For that matter, a betting man wouldn't give Western society very good odds either.  A person with a longer historical view would give both better odds, and be comforted by the lessons of history on discord, discontent, decay and decline, but only cautiously.

2020 is proving to be the Summer of Our Discontent, but we've been on this path for awhile.  It might be time to reflect getting off of it and looking for solid ground, but then that would mean not putting our own self interest constantly first.


Saturday, January 11, 2020

The Royals. M'eh

According to the Canadian news paper the National Post about 60% of Canadians hope that Prince Harry will become the next Governor General of Canada.

The Governor General is the representative of the Queen, and we've discussed the Queen in Canada once before.  Indeed, that topic was once one of the most favorite ones here:

Queen Elizabeth II in Canada


This is a young Queen Elizabeth II in Canada, but what else does it depict?  I frankly don't know.  Its a photo from my mother's collection, and unfortunately, I no longer know the story behind it.

Does anyone stopping in here know?

Anyhow, the National Post had this headline the other day:

'Celebrities': Will Prince Harry take over the post of governor general? Canadians are hopeful, poll says

Here's hoping there isn't a next Governor General at all and that the Windsors simply fold up shop and become private citizens.

Something I don't mention here very often is that I'm a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.  Now, I'm a resident of the US and have been my entire life, but I hold dual citizenship because my late mother was from Quebec and only became a US citizen late in life.  Indeed, my father had already passed at the time.

I guess that gives me somewhat of a right to comment on this as a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, but only somewhat.  While I may hold Canadian citizenship I'm not going to pretend that I'm Canadian in the same way that somebody who really lives in Canada does.  It's a legal oddity, I guess, in my case but I will confess that I do feel a closeness to Canada in a way that most Americans are not likely to.  I have a large collection of Canadian relatives and my mother was always very Canadian.

Indeed, in a sort of way, Canadians like me, who hold citizenship because of an ancestral connection, are remnants and reminders of what Canada is and was perhaps more than current residents are, which is probably both instructive and irritating to current residents of the country.  I don't appreciate it when people whose grandparents once lived in my home state feel free to spout off in the local letters to the editor section about the way the state ought to be and I doubt born and raised Canadians appreciate being treated in the same manner. 

None of which keeps me from occasionally commenting on Canadian affairs. .  . or Commonwealth ones.

Which is what this is.

Canada is of course a fully independent nation but it's also part of the English Commonwealth and the Queen is the sovereign of the country.  The Queen of England, that is.

This is somewhat of a confusing topic for people who aren't in the Commonwealth but, to reduce it to the point where it's probably deceptive, the British Empire recognized at some point after the American Revolution that not eventually establishing political independence for colonies was a bad idea and made the residents of them very crabby.  It therefore established a dominion status for them at some point which meant that what had been colonies, like Canada, were converted into self governing dominions.  In that system, those dominions governed their internal affairs completely while their external affairs were largely governed by the United Kingdom, the mother country.  The jurisprudential concept was that there were lots of English dominions but only one Empire.

In the late 19th Century this view became highly developed and there was a lot of talk of Empire in sort of a glorified fashion, in which it was imagined that one big happy British Empire would exist with lots of happy smaller British states.  An English Commonwealth of Nations.  Naturally the mother Parliament would continue to govern foreign affairs, as it was the Parliament of the empire.

Well, this started to really fall apart after World War One.  The UK had declared war for the entire Empire in 1914 so countries like Canada and Australia, both dominions, went to war because of that. They didn't do it themselves.  They raised their own armies, to be sure, along with other dominions like New Zealand and South Africa, but after the war the obvious problem of a nation asking its sons to die in a titanic conflict that they had no say about getting into caused the British Parliament to loose that extra national status.  The Commonwealth was still real, but it became more of a cultural union with strong international economic, immigration and emigration benefits for the members.

The Commonwealth took an additional blow when Ireland basically disregarded its dominion status in the Second World War and refused to enter into the conflict.  India showed little interest i dominion status after the war.  Lots of nations joined the Commonwealth after World War Two as they became independent, but the economic advantage evaporated when the UK entered the European Community.  Ironically, it's just left.

Maybe that'll give a boost to the Commonwealth again, which had real economic features to it.

At any rate, because of this history Canada retains the position of Governor General.  That's because the Queen remains the sovereign.

What's that mean?

Well, Queen Elizabeth II has the constitutional right as the sovereign to act much in the same way, indeed beyond the same way, that the President of the United States can. She calls the Canadian Parliament into session and she approves or disallows the legislation it passes.  Therefore, she can veto any Canadian bill.

The Governor General holds the powers of the sovereign in her stead.  Queen Elizabeth, as with all the royals, has no real desire, I'm sure to open the parliaments of all fifteen Commonwealth countries nor to preside in some fashion over the legislative process of all of them.  Indeed, in modern times the Crown has been careful not to really become involved in politics anywhere, including in the United Kingdom, quite wisely.

Indeed, no modern Governor General has ever denied ascent to a bill of the Canadian parliament.  A provincial one (yes, there are provincial ones) last operated to do so in 1961 in Saskatchewan.  It'd be phenomenal if any of them did so now, although the thought of it occurring in the form of an act by Prince Harry is amusing.

It's amusing as royalty itself is sort of amusing.

The current Governor General is Julie Payett, who was appointed to that role by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  They serve at the Queen's pleasure, but in practice it tends to be a five year appointment.  So the PM could choose to appoint Prince Harry to the role after Payett runs her course in 2022.  The Queen, for her part, could turn Harry down, but that would be odd and he's in need of a job.

Does any of this make any sense in the modern world?

Well, it makes a little, but none of that does anything to remove the fact that royalty is really odd and the English monarchy is quite odd, as an institution.

People really like to imagine that the English Royal Family and all its impressive majesty and ceremony date back to ancient times.

That's because they haven't studied it.

In reality, the early English monarchs were from different royal lines, although supposedly the current Queen is a distance ancestor of one of the very first monarchs, but that's only because huge numbers of the English now are.  Early on, simply being king didn't mean you'd occupy the position until death, and death tended to come pretty early for them. Some made it into what we'd now regard as old or at least late middle age, but of the early ones, more than a few died in their 30s. 

And more than a few had to constantly fight other claimants, as it was recognized that the heads of strong families had just about as much right to the thrown as any one occupant.  About the time of Ethelred the Unready (which meant "ill advised") the practice started of trying to incorporate sacred oaths into the process of choosing an heir to the thrown so that powerful men, subject to those oaths, wouldn't take a run at the crown, but that was only partially successful. 

This whole process went on seemingly forever and even the seizure of the thrown by the Normans in 1066 didn't stop it.

King Henry VIII, the Vandal.

During the Reformation the entire process took on an odder twist when King Henry VIII, not intending to make England a Protestant country, separated from Rome to establish what he naively thought was something like the Catholic Church of England.  Henry, who was constantly distracted by the topic of what babe ought to be in his bed chambers, listened too much to some of his Protestant advisers and the country went into prolonged religious strife during and after his death.  While the Church of England was established and slid around between being quite Protestant and not so much Protestant, while being challenged by the more Protestant and while suppressing the actual Catholics, the Crown itself was worn a couple of times by Catholic monarchs, who had the embarrassing role of also being head of head of the Church of England.  Ultimately the Parliament imported the really Protestant William of Orange from Holland, who had nothing else to do, and made him king.  For this reason the current family occupying the thrown had a really, really German last name (and a pretty good German bloodline) up until World War One, when they changed their last name to Windsor.

By the Great War the powers of the Crown had been reduced to a largely ceremonial role.  Indeed while Americans still like to claim they rebelled against King George in 1774, they really rebelled against the Parliament as by that time the King's role was vague and it was really Parliament that held real power.  Indeed, Parliament held real power by the time of the English Civil War in 1642-1651, as that was the original point of the war, before it began to feature a strong religious element to it.  The Crown reclaimed some  powers during the Restoration in 1660, but by that time it was pretty clear who was really running the country.

King Charles II of England.  He got the crown back his father had lost, but he made the Parliament nervous by his heavy partying, crypto Catholic ways (ironic in light of the former) and deathbed formal conversion to Catholicism.

After World War One the Crown went into a real crisis when King Edward VIII, who was an oddball who also complained about the heavy burdens of being a prince before he was King, abdicated when he became king in order to marry Wallace Simpson. We've dealt with that elsewhere, so we're not going to here.

Okay, with all that, what's going on now?

Well, I don't really know but of all the royal families in Europe the English royal family really gets the attention. There are other royal families. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands all have them.

But no nation needs one now and frankly the history of royal families is embarrassing.

If you follow reddit you can find the surprising communities of people who are enamored with monarchy.  Indeed, there's more than one blog dedicated to following old royal families and imagining a return to an extremely conservative social order if only they had more of a role in the world.  

But that's baloney.  In truth, monarchs tended to be just as likely to be weird and icky as they did noble and saintly.  In modern royal families its easy to find the history of affairs and scandal.  And some born into it, like Harry, don't like being captive royals.

And why would we imagine otherwise?  This collection of people is born into vast wealth with no real obligations.  Idle if they wish to be, the roles they fill are only filled by the pressure of their own families or by increasingly limited constitutional roles. And some of those roles should have caused eye rolling from the onset, such as the retained English one of being head of the church in England.

So now, Prince Harry, who seemingly has never done well with being a royal, basically wants out.  But in wanting out, because he's a royal, he gets privileges that other people do not.  He may be entitled to a share of the family's vast private wealth.  He and his wife get to move to Canada simply because he's a royal.

Well, let him out, but do away with the whole absurd charade.  Having a royal family hasn't made sense for well over a century, maybe two centuries.  The English aren't defined by their royal family anymore and Canada having one, given its current culture, is flat out odd.  

There's no reason not to make Queen Elizabeth II the last royal.  The Parliament should declare it and start working on sorting out what is really theirs as opposed to Britain's. They'll still be rich.  When she dies, she should be the last one.  Everyone else can go get a job, or not.

And the American Press can focus on something else.  We haven't had a royal since the Declaration of Independence. Why the close attention to them here?

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Okay, maybe I don't care if football players (who are individual people) take the knee, but keep your Corporation's "opinion" to itself.

Note, this is one of the many draft posts that I started a really long time ago, and then never finished.  I have on the order of 300 posts, most barely started, that fit that description.

Writer's block?  No, just the nature of available time.

Anyhow, this item oddly shows right back up in the news again.



Some time back I posted on football players "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem.  As anyone who read it may have noted, I'm sort of generally lukewarm on any opinion there, unlike a lot of people I see (if Facebook is any guide).  I.e, I didn't have a fit about football players taking the knee and, absent an individual athlete's protest reaching the level of that of the 1968 Mexico City, Olympics, I generally don't get too worked up about that.

At the same time, I also tend to disregard individual opinions of people who have risen to fame through their athleticism or because they're entertainers.  Recently, for example, I read where Beyonce was expressing opinions at a concert of some fashion.  It would be nearly impossible for me to care what Beyonce's opinion on anything at all actually is.  Indeed, I thought her daughter's instruction to "calm down" at a recent awards show was pretty much on the mark.

But opinions, particularly social opinions, by corporations really aggravate me.

Recently this has become particularly common, and while I'll give a few entities a pass, it smacks to me of being blisteringly phony.  If corporations, as a rule, suddenly endorse something that's been recently controversial, the issue has probably actually become safe to express.

What this amounts to, of course, is belated virtue signalling, and it's phony.  Corporations main goal, indeed, their stated and legal goal in almost every instance, is to make money for their shareholders.  That's their purpose and focus, and when corporations suddenly take up a cause, what they are often really doing has nothing to do with values and everything with trying to co-opt a movement for profit or not offend a group that's been lately in the news and has obtained financial power accordingly.

Indeed, it's frankly much more admirable when a corporation has a stated position that it adheres to in spite of financial detriment.  The fact that they know an opinion will be unpopular and they stick with it probably says its a real belief.

Which gets back to the perceived views of people in general.  If you look out at a crowed of people supporting anything, or in modern terms posting their support in some fashion on Facebook or Twitter or the like, probably over half, and I'd guess around 2/3s, have no strong convictions on the topic at all. They may believe they do, but in other circumstances they'd be there supporting the other side equally lukewarmly.

Today is American Independence Day.  The day came in the midst of a truly bloody war.  Around 23,000 Americans lost their lives in the war fighting for the Revolution, including those who died of disease, and a nearly equal number were wounded in an era when being wounded was often very disabling.  The British took about 24,000 casualties of all types, meaning they took fewer than the Americans.

But among the "British" were a sizable number of American colonist who fought for the Crown.  Up to 1/3d of American Colonist remained loyal during the war to the United Kingdom.  Only about 1/3d of the American Colonist supported independence or the revolution at all.  The remaining 1/3d took no position.

Even at that, it's not all that difficult, retrospectively, to find example of combatants who fought on both sides of the war.  Some captured American troops were paroled with the promise to fight for the British, and did.  The times being murky and records difficult to keep, some men just fought on both sides depending upon how the wind seemed to be blowing, a risky course of action, but one that some did indeed take.

Howard Pyle's illustration of Tory Refugees.

After the war those die hard Loyalist who couldn't tolerate living in the United States, including many who were so outed as Loyalist they had little choice on that matter, relocated to Quebec where there descendants are still sometimes self identified by initials that note an honorific conveyed by the Crown.  But 1/3d of the American population didn't pull up stakes and relocate, which tells you a lot.  And what that conveys is that a lot of people who thought that the Colonies were making a mistake just shut up.  Indeed, it proved to be the case during the War of 1812 that British soldiers met with sympathy and assistance in Virginia as they marched on Washington D. C., and that was because many Virginians, in that state which had been a colony, of course, retained a higher loyalty and sympathy with the United Kingdom than they did the United States.

But if you read most common commentary today you'll be left with the impression that the Americans, and by that we mean all of the Americans, were eager to shake off the chains of British tyranny.  And I'd wager that as the war began to turn in Congress' favor that view became common at the time and that it really set in by the time the American victory became inevitable.  So most of the men who spoke quietly in favor of King George III at the Rose and Thorne, or whatever, on Saturday nights in 1774 were praising George Washington by 1781.

This commentary, I'd note, isn't directed specifically at Americans in the 1700s by any means, but is more broader.  There are big exceptions to the rule of the get along nature of human opinion to be sure, for example I think the Civil War may be uniquely an exception to it, but people shouldn't make any mistake about this in general.  During the 1930s a lot of trendy social types teetered on the edge of real Communist sympathy while some conservative figures in the country spoke in admiration of Mussolini's and Hitler's governments in their countries.  By 1941, however, everybody in the country was an outright die hard opponent of fascism and militarism.  By 1950 nobody had ever been a Communist sympathizer, not ever.  

In 1968 and later a lot of young Americans protested vigorously about the American role in Vietnam. Quite a few of them vilified American servicemen.  By mid 1980s the same people were backing the troops and by the 1990s quite a few of them were for other foreign wars.

If this suggests that people's stated opinions are fickle and can't be trusted its meant to.  I was in university during the Reagan Administration and a college student would have had to been cavalier or in very trusted company to express any kind thoughts at all about Ronald Reagan.  One of my most conservative in every fashion friends of long standing would openly declare that Reagan was going to reinstate the draft and send us all to fight in Nicaragua, which was just the sort of nonsensical opinion common at the time.  One young computer employee in the geophysics department was unique not only because he was an early computer genius, employed with their super computer that probably is less powerful than a modern cell phone, but because as a recently discharged Navy submariner he was an adamant and open Anti Communist.  Nobody openly expressed views like that.

Which isn't to say that a lot of people didn't think them.

Which is also not to say that a lot of those same people, in the presence of the granola chick at the bar, didn't express the polar opposite.*

Which gets back to the topic of corporations.

If people's confused and muddled approach to what they declare their views is quite often the rule rather than the exception, this isn't the case with corporations.  More often than not, their goal is the bottom dollar.  They're looking out at the confused and muddled crowed and assuming its focused and distinct, and they then leap on board because they want to sell you pants, shoes, or whatever.  and that's cynical even if its self confused cynical.

Which is all the more reason to ignore, or actually buy from the company that is open about just wanting to sell you goods because that's what they do.

*Which recall Zero Mostel's character's line in The Front as to his reason for becoming a Communist.