Showing posts with label Smoking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smoking. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing & on Ash Wednesday


A couple of reruns. for the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, 2023, from a couple of years ago:  Lex Anteinternet: Secular suffering for nothing.

Secular suffering for nothing



Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

And one on Ash Wednesday itself:

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday for those churches that follow the Catholic Latin Rite's liturgical calendar, which includes a fair number of Protestant churches.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for Western Christians, Lent being the (approximately) forty day long penitential season preceding Easter.  Great Lent, the Eastern Christian seasons, precedes Ash Wednesday and commences on Clean Monday for Eastern Christians on the new calendar, but not on the old calendar which has, of course, which departs from the calendar we're otherwise familiar with.   The day is named for the Catholic practice, which is observed by at least some Anglicans and Lutherans as well, of placing ashes on the foreheads of those who come to the Ash Wednesday service, with the reminder being made that from ashes you were made, and from ashes you will return.*

For Latin Rite Catholics, Ash Wednesday is a day of fast and abstinence.  I.e, they eat only one full meal on this day and it can't include meat, which under Latin Rite Catholic rules does not include fish.  For Eastern Christians a much stricter Lenten fast and abstinence set of rules applies.  This sacrifice serves the purpose of being penitential in nature.

It also serves to really set Catholics apart, as fasting and abstinence are the rage in the west now, but for purely secular purposes, not all of which square with science or good dietary practices.

For the members of the Apostolic faiths, Lent also serves as a time in which for penitential reasons they usually "give up" something.  A lot of people have a really superficial understanding of this, assuming that Catholic "give up" desert or chocolate or something, and in fact quite a few people do something like that. Indeed, as an adult I've been surprised by how many Catholics (usually men) give up drinking alcohol, which means that frequent consumption of alcohol is pretty common society wide in a way that we probably underestimate.

Indeed, just recently, on that, I was asked by an exuberant Catholic Midwestern expat, who seemingly has no boundaries at all, on what I was "giving up" for Lent. This was the week prior to Ash Wednesday at which time I wasn't particularly focused on it myself.  The same fellow asked at least one Protestant what she was giving up, with that Protestant being a member of one of the American millennialism religions, to receive a totally baffled reply.  Indeed, I'm sure they don't celebrate Lent at all, so the question was odd.  Anyhow, he was giving up alcohol and asked if I'd like to join him, to which I absent mindedly said sure.  Later he was wondering if I thought it would be tough, which I'm sure it won't be at all and I'll have to find something else to mark Lent really.  But that sort of "giving up" line of thinking is very common.

In a lot of Catholic cultures the Lenten penitential observations have traditionally been much stronger, which helps explain Mardi Gras as we just discussed.  Even well after the Latin Rite rules were very much relaxed, in many Catholic areas, including Catholic areas of the United States, people engaged in much more extensive penitential observations with the "giving up chocolate" type thing really sort of an introduction to the practice.  In Louisiana, without going into it too deeply, there was traditionally a big spike in births nine to ten months after Easter, which reflected a very widespread serious observation among Catholic couples as to their penitential practice, for example.

Some of that is really coming back, which reflects an interesting trend towards a deeper understanding of their faiths by members of the Apostolic faiths and even a return of Lenten traditions in some Protestant ones.  During the full "Spirit of Vatican Two" era there was a lot of attention devoted to not giving anything up but rather to work on some spiritual need.  I.e, be self reflective and work on what that lead you to.  At the same time, the misuse of the word "fasting" became very common, with there being advice, even from the clergy, to fast from things other than food or drink.  You can't really fast from sinful behavior, or from narcissism, for example.  You can't even "fast" from the Internet, although "giving it up" for Lent might be a darned good idea (one that I really ought to consider, probably).

A lot of that is now passing and there's been a real return to more traditional observations of Lent, including fasting but also forms of dedicated worship and observation.

Which brings me to the next thing about "giving up".  One feature of this season is that many Apostolic Christians, as it is the season of repentance, have used the season to break bad conduct when there's support, spiritual and temporal, for doing it.  People with alcohol problems will use it to break them, smokers will quit smoking during Lent so they can quit smoking.  And sometimes people with serious attachments to sin take it head on during Lent, with some people I've known even announcing the renouncement of what are very serious sins from a Christian purpose over Lent in the hopes of breaking from the permanently. And many who do that, succeed at doing that.

Which in turn takes us to our final observation.  This season, which is lead by the Apostolic faiths but which is observed by at least some of the Protestants as well, tend to turn the self indulgent retained Puritan abstinence on its head.  I've noted this before, but North American and the Northern Europe may have strayed enormously from Calvinist influence in terms of faith, but not in terms of the concept that public suffering is really necessary.  That retained concept explains in large part the real focus in these lands, as opposed to others, in "giving up" something for no real purpose other than the sense it must be done.  People give up all sorts of things that Apostolic Christians around the world give up for forty some days, and often on a declared permanent basis (they fail at it more often than not), with it being notable that the purely secular nature of that makes it shallow from the onset.  Indeed, plenty of people who will spend Lent scoffing at Catholics for Lent will spend part of the season or all of it on some no carb, or no meat, or whatever, diet, for no real reason other than a constructed one. Suffering, in many instances, is the ultimate goal of those efforts, but suffering without something to redeem it.

For Apostolic Christians, all fasts are followed by feasts, and that's something to remember.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I don't think this is a practice in the East and its not a requirement for Catholics, something that in fact even confuses some Catholics.  Ash Wednesday is widely observed by Catholics and the placing of the ashes isn't restricted to Catholics.  Perhaps for that reason quite a few Catholics assume it is a Holy Day of Obligation.

One thing of note here is that Ash Wednesday also serves to point out to everyone who is a Catholic, as if a person has ashes on their head, they're probably Catholic, although not necessarily.  By the same token, if you are known to be a Catholic and don't make it to Ash Wednesday you'll tend to get comments about it.

Thursday, June 9, 2022

Some thoughts on the late teen/early adult years.

The gun control bill that passed the house proposes to raise the purchase age for firearms to 21.

Teenage soldier, i.e., me. 1982.  At that age I was plenty mature enough for this role.

The counterargument is somewhat predictable for this.  "If you can serve in the military at age 21 and carry a weapon for your country. . ."

But why can you do that at age 21?

Under the original U.S. Constitution you couldn't vote until you were 21 years of age, that being the age at which the founders deemed a man (and originally it was just men) mature enough to participate in the serious business of choosing a government.  The age was changed in the late stage of the Vietnam War, under the logic if that if you were old enough to fight for your country, you were old enough to vote and participate in the decisions that led to the fighting.  That reflected the conscription age at the time, which had reached down to 18 for most of the war, even though, as noted above, it had climbed a bit late war, and even though teenage soldiers in the Vietnam War were actually fairly rare.

All the states had militia duty requirements at the time the Constitution was enacted, as the colonies also had them prior to that and dating back to their founding. Most of these made men liable for militia service between 18 and 45 years of age.

The Federal Government didn't conscript men into military service until the Civil War, at which point it passed a bill during the war making men from age 20 to 45 years of age eligible for conscription.  The southern rebellious states passed a federal conscription provision which at first covered ages 18 to 35 and then later ages 17 to 60.  The South had a real manpower problem, it might be noted, and at the bitter end of the war, it made slaves liable for conscription, demonstrating that, because there's no reason to believe they would have made willing soldiers against their own best interest.

The draft ranges for conscription during World War was fell between age 21 and 30. The first draft range for World War Two was from 21 to 35, but as the war went on it dropped to 18 years of age and up into the 40s for the upper range.  Starting in 1948 men were eligible again for the draft at age 19.  It dropped to 18 during the Korean War and stayed there until 1969, when Nixon ordered it back up to age 19.

We lack conscription now, of course, but men between the years of 18 to 35 are liable under the Selective Service provisions to conscription and are "obligors" under the law.

Hmmmm.

Interestingly, the mid 20th Century also saw men start to graduate high school as a rule, which is also at age 18.  High school graduation rates overall, for men and women combined, rose from 6% in 1900 to 80% by 1970, near the end of the Vietnam War.  The American system of education developed such that schooling normally completed, as noted, around age 18, although some did graduate at 17 when I was a high schooler, and some at 19.  As late as the late 1930s only around half of the male population graduated from high school, but that was very rapidly changing and soon after the war most men and women graduated.

In every U.S. state you can marry, the most serious thing a person can do, and marry freely, at age 18.  While people who like to get spastic about it misconstrue it, you can marry below that with permission of your parents or authorities in most states younger than that.  18 years of age in order to contact a marriage is the global norm, interestingly, although there are some exceptions.  Honduras, for example, sets the age at 21.  Japan at 20.  The Philippines at 21.  A few nations set the minimum age for women, oddly enough, below 18, usually at 16 or 17.

The other "age of consent" is generally age 18 in the United States, although there are all sorts of other rules and factors that go into that, so it's not really safe to opine on.  What's safer to opine on is that generally in the US women become far game for male predation at age 18 and that's the age where it's generally legally safe for them to be subject to all sorts of creepy behavior.  The same is true for men, but it's women that are largely the victims in this area, although not exclusively so.

In the US, the drinking age everywhere, due to Federal pressure on the topic, is 21. When I was 19, the drinking age in Wyoming was 19, which it had been dropped to during the Vietnam War due to the same logic that prevailed regarding voting.   

As of 2019, the minimum age to buy tobacco is 21.  In most of "progressive" Canada, it's 18.  Where it isn't 18 in Canada, it's 19.

In much of the US, you can drive at age 16.  This is true in Canada and Mexico as well, but the global norm, although there's lots of variety in it, is 18.

In most of the US you have to be at least 20 to rent a car, although as a practical matter, that age is really 23.

Odd, isn't it?

Research has determined that the male brain continues to develop until age 25, which is when men basically reach maturity, whereas for women it's 21.  Some studies push that up to 25 for men and women. A British study found that men reach full emotional maturity at approximately age 43, whereas women do at 32, which is a bit of a different thing than developmental maturity.

Which brings us to this.

The founders setting the voting age at 21 reflected their actual experience.  People like to imagine that everybody did everything younger back in the day, but this isn't really the case at all.  As we've discussed here before, actual marriage ages haven't changed hardly at all since the Middle Ages.  They'll occasionally go up (usually due to economic conditions), and rarely go down, but they return to a well established median.   The current "everyone is getting married older" story really reflects the latter.

Marriage, rather obviously, was allowed at a younger age than 21, but there are biological factors at work there that would tend to explain that, at least up until the government became the substitute daddy allowing men to evade responsibility for their offspring.

The odd thing about age in the early history of the country was the age for compulsory bearing of arms was 18.  Why?  No idea.  When conscription first came about, it was set at age 21, the age you could vote, and remained that age until the Second World War, when it was dropped to 18.

Driving ages are at low ages in North America because of farm economies.  Lots of drivers were, at one time, young farm drivers.

Which brings us to this.

The current pattern of living may reflect the historic norm in the US more than we suppose.  We've dealt with it before, but up until World War Two, the basic norm for most men was to leave high school, by graduation or otherwise, and then go to work.  Most men lived at home until they married.  Most women lived at home until they married. And for most, they were 21 years of age or older at that time.  The World War Two period brought in a demographic and behavioral exception, but it was due to external forces.  Large scale conscription and a booming economy, following the Great Depression, followed by the massive expansion of the economy and higher education.  The trend that started in 1939 lasted a few decades, but we've seen a return to the older pattern of living more recently.

Which perhaps gets back to this.

The new gun control provision probably makes a lot of sense.  There are reasons to preclude people who have not reached maturity from buying firearms.

But there are probably reasons not to allow them to do other responsible things as well, including voting.

Maybe, looked at this rationally and scientifically, the military ought to not be open to enlistment until age 21.  Maybe the "age of consent", or exploitation, ought to be 21.  Maybe public education ought to expand up to age 21.

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Best Post of the Week of January 23, 2022

The best posts of the week of January 23, 2022

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXVIII. The juvenile or nearly so femme fatale edition. Plus, the example of monarchy, Robbing trains, Expats and politics, M&M's, Tucker Carson and Carson Tucker.









I posted the above entry with the photo above, even though it goes on much longer than that, as the same photo was posted on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today thread where it received a large number of likes and lots of comments.

I'm not sure what it is, and I don't know that I want to, but I've noticed that any photos of young women on Reddit tend to go a bit wild.  It's a bit scary.

Quite awhile back I posted on the same sub a photo of a couple of young Kurdish women and some people were nearly overcome by it.  If I recall, they were simply in traditional dress, getting water.

Anyhow, I'm often surprised but what people are really fascinated by and what they are not.  This is one such example.

As an aside, one sharp-eyed observer wondered if the girl on the right was holding a cigar.  I hadn't even noticed, but frankly I think she is.  Opinions?

I have to say, the two young women look very happy.  I hope their live were happy ones.

2022 Wyoming Legislative Session. Part I.




Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Women smoking. How did it come back?


I wish it hadn't.

I'm amazed by how many young women smoke, and comparatively how few men do.   This is very much the reverse of the way things were when I was young.  I.e., a lot of men smoked, but comparatively fewer women did.

Which isn't to say that women didn't smoke.

Historically, women smoking was frowned upon.  It didn't really get rolling until the teens.  Prior to that, it was not only looked down upon, but suggestive in a variety of ways, none of which were really good to have suggested about you.  

Following World War One, however, it rapidly expanded. Cigarettes alone got a big boost by the Great War, taking over from cigars as the favored nicotine delivery method, and the Roaring Twenties brought in flapperism and all that entailed, including suggestive clothing, illegal booze, and of course smoking cigarettes.  Flapperism went away but the illegal booze and smoking didin't, something that kept on keeping on during the Great Depression.  Drinking became legal again and smoking became nearly universal.

Women had their own brand of cigarettes during the Feminist revolution of the 1970s, Virginia Slims, a name that not only referred to the cigarettes themselves but what smoking can do, at first, to a person's figure.

Ultimately it'll ruin that figure, of course.  And for women it not only increases the risk of lung cancer, but breast cancer.  We know this for sure, and nobody really denies that.

Given that, smoking really declined following the 70s. Even by the late 1970s, when I was in high school, girls smoking did so to suggest they were "bad" girls, although most weren't really bad. Rather, they were like Jessica Rabbit, just drawn that way, and in their case, attempting to draw themselves that way.  Rebels without a clue, so to speak.

In college I can't recall very many women smoking.  I can recall some university men smoking, but by and large it had really fallen out of favor.  And when I was first practicing law, it was really on the outs. A smoking woman could be guaranteed to be at least middle aged  and therefore, not young.

Well, it's really back.

Why?

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Friday October 31, 1941. Did you have a friend on the Good Reuben James?

On this day in 1941 the USS Reuben James, a destroyer, was sunk by a U-boat while escorting merchant ships.  The destroyer was not flying the US ensign at the time and therefore wouldn't have been completely easy for a U-boat to identify as a US ship.  At the time it was hit, it was dropping depth chargers on another U-boat, although ironically the U-552 was actually aiming for the merchant ship, which was carrying ammunition, at the time it was hit.

100 sailers were killed in the strike, only 44 survived. The ship sank rapidly.

The event resulted in a notable folk song by Woody Guthrie.

While tragic, the event was another example of the United States really crossing the line on what a neutral could do.  The ship wasn't flying the US ensign and it was attempting to sink a U-boat when it was instead sunk itself.  Perhaps realizing that this was of a certain type of nature, the American public didn't rush towards war as a result of the sinking, as it likely would have done in 1917.

Guthrie's song was perhaps a natural for him.  He was a communist and had been, therefore, an "anti fascist" since the Spanish Civil War days. The US entry into the war would lead him to be concerned about being conscripted into the Army, when the war came, and he actively attempted to receive an assignment through the Army to the USO, and effort which not too surprisingly failed.  He then joined the Merchant Marines, which was a role that was actually more dangerous than being a combat infantryman.  He served as a Merchant Marine from June 1943 until 1945, when his status as a communist resulted in the government requiring his discharge from that service.  In July 1945 he was conscripted into the U.S. Army.  

Guthrie's relationship with the Federal Government was an odd one.  During the Depression and even after he was commissioned to write songs for the government, and famously wrote a set of songs associated with damming the Columbia River.  He was a true musical genius of the folk genre, and while he was openly a communist or communistic,it probably only really shows strongly in one of his songs, the much misunderstood This Land Is Your Land.  He died in 1967 at age 55 of Woody Guthrie's Disease.  He was the father, of course, of musical legend Arlo Guthrie.

Final drilling took place on the monuments at Mt. Rushmore. This is regarded as the project's completion.

Mt. Rushmore, October 2011















Nazi Germany imposed a heavy "sin tax" on this date in 1941, which it claimed was to reduce consumption of unhealthful products.  The tax was on tobacco, hard liquor and champagne.

Health measure or not, by this point in the war the German economy had been overheated for a decade and things were getting worse. The Nazis did legitimately oppose tobacco consumption and were aware of its health dangers in a pioneering manner.  Hitler, who had weird dietary views, was a teetotaler but the more likely reason for the tax on hard liquor and champagne was that they needed the money and the production of both resulted in caloric diversions that could have been better invested in other agricultural products.  The Nazis did not attempt to take on beer, however.

Thursday, June 24, 2021

June 24, 1921. 11th Field Artillery Brigade, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, Cigar Makers, and Mondell visiting Harding.


11th Field Artillery Brigade, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.  June 24, 1921.

The text on the photo reads:

"Just before passing in review before the Department Commander in this closely massed formation on June 24, 1921. (About 400 vehicles). No motor failed and formation remained intact, a record that will rarely be equalled and never surpassed. Tiemann N. Horn, Colonel 13th Field Artillery commanding. To General John J. Pershing, with the compliments of the brigade. R. L. Dancy, Army & Navy Photographer.".

Employees of 7-20-4, R. G. Sullivan, Cigar Factory, Manchester, N.H., no. 192, 100 [percent] Members of Cigar Makers, International Union, June 24, '21

On the same day, the employees of a cigar factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, were photographed.


As was President Harding with Wyoming's Congressman, Frank Wheeler Mondell.  Apparently that inspired President Harding to don an exceedingly large cowboy hat.

Mondell was originally from St. Louis, Missouri and had become a rancher and farmer in Wyoming, as well as a businessman involved in railroad construction.  He'd was Newcastle's mayor from 1888 to 1895 and served in Congress from 1895 to 1896 and then again from 1899 to 1923.  He was the House majority leader in the 66th and 67th Congresses.

Friday, May 14, 2021

May 14, 1921. Stormy Weather



The major impacts of the Geomagnetic Storm of 1921 impact Earth.  In the US, New York, which has more in the nature of telecommunications than other states, is particularly hit.  The impacts were serious even for the era in which there was relatively little in the way of electronics.  As a scientific paper notes:

The most spectacular (and most dangerous) examples of GIC impact were two destructive fires—the first in Sweden around 02:00 GMT on 15 May and the second in the United States around an hour later (times shown in Figure 2a by the upper pair of magenta arrows) The Swedish event occurred in a telephone exchange in the town of Karlstad, 260 km west of Stockholm. This event was widely reported around the world (e.g., Fouche et al., 1921; New York Times (NYT), 1921c; Daily Herald, 1921; Belfast Telegraph, 1921; Sunderland Daily Echo, 1921). It was also the subject of contemporary study by David Stenquist, a Swedish scientist and engineer, who had a long interest in what we would now call GIC impacts on telecommunications systems. One of his narrative reports on the event is included in his 1925 memoir on earth currents (Stenquist, 1925), and another is reproduced by Karsberg et al. (1959). They both outline how the operators at Karlstad exchange first experienced problems (equipment anomalies and faint smoke) around 01:00, followed by a period of quiet, before the main fire started around 02:00 leading to extensive equipment damage. (The scale of that damage is recorded in contemporary photographs held by several Swedish museums, as discussed in the supporting information.) Stenquist also highlighted a near‐miss incident at Ånge, some 380 km north west of Stockholm, that was simultaneous with the Karlstad fire. This experienced a threat similar to that fire, but where the initial problems were sufficient to trigger preventive measures that avoided major damage. In his later analysis of the Karlstad fire (Albinson, 2018; Engström, 1928; Stenquist, 1925), Stenquist noted that this site was vulnerable to strong GIC, because it was on the 400 km route of the major communications lines between Oslo and Stockholm, and this route was vulnerable because of its east‐west orientation. His insights into engineering design of the communications lines enabled him to estimate the geoelectric fields that created the damaging GIC. He showed that fields of at least 6 V/km were required to cause the observed melting of fuses, “tubes de fusion,” in copper wires, and that a field of 20 V/km would have caused more damage than observed (melting of fuses in iron wires). As a result he suggested that 10 V/km would be a reasonable estimate of the average geoelectric field in central Sweden at the time of the Karlstad fire. A later review of GIC impacts on wired telecommunications (Sanders, 1961) noted that in the case of the Karlstad fire, these fields would have been applied over a typical line length of 100 to 200 km, and thus concluded that the induced voltages on the lines into Karlstad would be of order 1,000 V.

The U.S. fire occurred in the village of Brewster in New York state, some 80 km north of New York city, between 03:00 and 04:00 GMT. The fire started in a switch‐board at the Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly spread to destroy the whole building (Brewster Standard, 1921a; NYT, 1921c). The first reference notes that the night operator had to evacuate the building, rousing another person asleep in the building as well as saving some valuables. There is also evidence of significant damage elsewhere in the Northeast United States caused by GIC during this storm with communications being delayed on 16 May due to the need to repair damage such as burned‐out equipment (Berkshire Eagle, 1921). One major example is that the Boston and Albany Railroad experienced damage to telegraph and telephone equipment in many places along its 250‐km route between Boston and Albany (Springfield Republican, 1921). This reference notes that the damage was most significant in the western half of the route, which passed around 100 km north of Brewster. Unfortunately, the reference does not provide any detailed information on the times when damage occurred on the Boston and Albany systems. However, it does note that other railroads in the Northeast United States (e.g., New Haven, Boston and Maine) were much less affected and attributes the vulnerability of the Boston and Albany route to its east‐west orientation. In contrast to Stenquist's analysis of the Karlstad fire, we do not appear to have any contemporary estimates of the geoelectric fields in the Northeast United States. However, there are many reports that induced voltages up to 1,000 V were measured on telegraph systems in that region (Lyman, 1921; NYT, 1921c; Telegraph and Telephone Age, 1921c). Such large voltages on telegraph lines are suggestive of geoelectric fields of order 10 V/km, as noted by Sanders (1961) in his discussion of the Karlstad fire. They are also consistent with Sanders' report that geoelectric fields of similar strength had been observed in the United States during earlier geomagnetic storms.

On this day in 1921, although I don't have a copy of it, Leslie's ran an article entitled "Is Tobacco Doomed?"

While the geomagnetic storm was ranging planet wide, a more terrestrial storm event was occurring in Maryland.



That didn't stop, however, the horse show from receiving spectators in Washington, D.C., including these ladies from the Junior League.

Sunday, April 11, 2021

April 11, 1921. Glass Arm Eddie, First Broadcast Lightweight Boxing Match, 67th Congress, Transjordan, Cigarettes in Iowa.

Eddie Brown.

On the same day that Eddie Brown, Centerfielder, was photographed, the first radio broadcast of a lightweight boxing match may, or may not have, been done:

Old Radio: April 11, 1921: The First Lightweight Boxing Match...: April 11, 1921: The first lightweight boxing match on radio between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee was broadcasted live on this day ...
Pity the poor blogger on something like this. . . 

On this Monday of April, 1921, the 67th Congress was sworn in.


The United Kingdom established the Emirate of Transjordan, which today is the Kingdom of Jordan. Abdullah, the future king, was the Emir.  His grandson is the present king. 

The kingdom has been in the news recently as it may be that a case of sibling rivalry has popped up, and is even potentially dangerous.  

Iowa lifted a prohibition on the sale of cigarettes, a retrograde act that shows the could happen.  

Indeed, cigarette prohibition was an early 20th Century thing that shows the dangers of tobacco, while not really fully understood, weren't completely unknown either.  Prior to Iowa three other states had banned the sale, and even the possession, of cigarettes.


World War One, however, hadn't helped matters.  Indeed, while the Great War had helped push alcohol over the top in terms of being passed, the same factors were somewhat at work.  Thousands of men had been exposed to young drinking during the war and to societies in which, at that time, alcohol was simply part of life and a matter of routine daily consumption.  And cigarettes had poured into the trenches during the war in no small part due to the stress of the situation, and the fact that cigarettes were easier to smoke than their competitors.

1919 cigarette advertisement with  youthful smoking veteran.

For whatever reason, cigarettes really are more dangerous than pipes or cigars, health wise, which doesn't mean any of them are safe.  Lung cancer rates would start to spike in the 1930s due to them.

It's odd to think that my father's father, who was from Iowa originally, was a lifelong Camel cigarette smoker, albeit "life long" is deceptive as he died in his 40s.

On the same day, telephone service was established from Florida to Cuba, and as that lays on the path to cell phones, it was also a retrograde movement. A look at somebody in a distant land, from what seems to be the distant past:

Thursday, April 1, 2021

April 1, 1971 Cigarette Advertisement ban signed

President Nixon signed legislation that banned cigarette advertising on radio and television. The ban would not go into effect for the rest of the year.  Cigarette advertising had been a major feature of television advertising up to that time, with the theme of the Magnificent Seven effectively used by Marlboro on its cowboy themed television advertisements.  Somewhere, I have an old record that dates back to that put out by Marlboro.

The banning of the advertisements was a major event.

The United Kingdom ended restrictions on gold ownership  The gold standard was fully on its way out globally at the time, although the British had been off of the gold standard directly since 1931.  The Bretton Woods Agreement, however, had put the nations entering it onto an international gold standard system. That system was rapidly collapsing in 1971.

Canada introduced its postal code in a test run in Ottawa.  The U.S. Zip code had been in effect since 1963.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Secular suffering for nothing



Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

Friday, August 21, 2020

That Smell. The past, present, and odors

Smell! 
WHY is it that the poet tells; So little of the sense of smell?These are the odors I love well: 
The smell of coffee freshly ground;Or rich plum pudding, holly crowned;Or onions fried and deeply browned. 
The fragrance of a fumy pipe;The smell of apples, newly ripe;And printer's ink on leaden type. 
Woods by moonlight in September Breathe most sweet, and I remember Many a smoky camp-fire ember. 
Camphor, turpentine, and tea,The balsam of a Christmas tree,These are whiffs of gramarye. . . 
A ship smells best of all to me!
Christopher Moreley


Just the other day here I did a post on coal stoves, which was inspired by a post on the A Hundred Years Ago blog.  In that post, I mentioned the smell of burning coal and became diverted on the topics of routine smells of the past.  I noted there.

Which brings up this odd point.  When we read about the history of something, we usually appreciate the sense of sight much more than anything else, as we have a "mind's eye".  We don't have a "mind's smell", and while extraordinary smells are noted in fiction and history, its only when they're extraordinary.  We are much more likely to have something described to us as to what it looked like than anything else, as that's principally how we perceive the world.  We might get in what people heard as well in a description, particularly if its speech, but only rarely do we read as to what something smelled like.  You can read, for instance, volumes and volumes of Westerns that contain a line about what horses in a corral look like, but as anyone who has been around such scenes in real life knows, there's a distinct smell that goes with that.

And indeed the entire world was full of smells a century ago that most of us don't even imagine today.  I'd argue that the average person encountered many more smells on a daily basis, no matter where they lived or what they did, than they do now.  Today, I'll get up, shave at some point, and go to work.  In the course of doing that, I'm going to smell the coffee I make, smell the shaving cream I use, and maybe smell a little bit of fuel my motor vehicle burns on the way to work.  I probably won't encounter any distinct smells until somebody makes lunch at work, if somebody does, and then again until I come home and smell dinner cooking, or maybe the grill on.  Pretty minimal.

But if I lived a century ago, there'd be a lot more.  The stoves used for cooking gave off wood, and now I know coal, smells. Coffee still smelled.  Lunch time meals had more smells. Horses in the street had their own smells, to which was added the smell of horse urine and horse flop.  In big cities, in tenement districts, people kept chickens and livestock, which definitely have a smell.  Washing was more difficult so clothing was more likely to have a smell.  Men didn't use deodorant at the time and therefore for men in the workplace, and that was mostly men, they had a smell.  Women of course would as well, but chances are that women were more likely to use perfume to cover their smells, which was its principal original purpose, and that stuff has a (horrible, in my opinion) smell.  Men smoked in large numbers and women were just starting too, and that certainly has a smell.

I won't argue that we now have a poverty of smells. But the world, mid 20th Century, certainly had a lot more smells.

And among those smells were smoke.  And some of that smoke was from coal fired stoves.

And I went on from there to post on our even smokier past.

I'm going to expand on that a little bit.  I.e., what did the world smell like to an average person, on an average day?

Well, it wouldn't be too much to say that it smelled a lot.

That may sound like an odd question, but it would have been significantly different than it is now.

On an average day now, I get up and make coffee. Indeed, the days which I don't have coffee in an average year vary from less than five to zero.  I drink coffee. but only at  home.  I.e,. I don't drink it at the office.

Coffee has a distinct, and pleasant, smell.

Most days if I eat breakfast, which I don't always, it's just cereal.  Cereal doesn't have much of a smell if any at all.  Sooner or later I shave, and that means I use a scented shaving products as its all scented.  I get dressed and go to work.  As I can't stand the perfume that goes into laundry soap, my clothes don't smell like that.

I generally drive to work, although sometimes I ride my bike.  If I bike, I encounter other smells than I might if I drive, although recently the top has been off my Jeep so I am catching scents coming and going, including the scents of the two flattened skunks that are down the highway.  When I drive the Jeep, I also catch a lot of vehicle odors, which people inside other vehicles don't.  I.e., I smell their exhaust, sometimes their burning brakes, burning oil, and the cigarettes that smokers open their windows to vent.

At work there are really no noticeable smells except the coffee made early in the day and then whatever people heat up in the microwave for lunch. Microwaved meals have a smell, of course.  I once had a paralegal that intentionally burned oatmeal for breakfast every day which raised two questions; 1) why would a person like burnt oatmeal and 2) why didn't she eat on her own time?  Another paralegal I had was on a weird diet that entailed heating boiled eggs in vinegar which, I assure you, stinks.

Sometimes I catch some distinct smells in the elevator during the day.  Years ago I had a paralegal who wore copious amounts of perfume, which I can't stand, and you could definitely smell that.  An old lawyer on another floor smoked cigarettes constantly, including the elevator, and you could smell that.  When I first practiced law we allowed some people to smoke in their offices, where as now people have to go outside of the building to smoke, and of course that smell.  One lawyer who worked for us years ago smoked cigars if he was close to trial for, I guess, stress relief, and cigars have a distinct odor.

When I leave the building at noon I catch the smell of the Mexican kitchen the restaurant across the street and the Chinese kitchen in the restaurant around the block.  On the way home at the end of the day I can catch the smells of barbeques that have been heated up for summertime evening meals.

All pretty routine.

What if it was when we started this blog off, around 1910? Or what about later, around 1920?

If it were 1910, or 20, and in the summer, or for that matter the winter, the first thing that would happen would be a stove would be stoked.  No stove, no coffee.  I've imagined most stoves were wood fired, but I've found out in the last few days, I'm wrong. They were coal fired.  Indeed, I now have to go back and correct something I wrote in my slow moving novel.

So, the first thing I do on any day would be to fire a stove with coal in order to make coffee.  That would take some time.



And then I'd make coffee.  And making that sort of coffee involves boiling coffee.

Portable gas camp stove. The coffee pot on the left is being used to boil coffee the old fashioned way.  Ground coffee dumped in the pot and boiled.

This process would have taken some time. Fortunately for me, I'm a really early riser, so that would not have been a problem.  This would have left the stove warm enough for anyone who wanted a cooked breakfast, which I doubt would have been me.  Cereal was already around at the time and I could see myself having been an early adopter of it.  If I did cook something, it would probably be oatmeal, which my mother called porridge (it took me a long time to realize that they are normally the same thing in most households), when she referred to it from her youth.  She didn't like it.

World War One vintage advertisement boosting cereals for breakfast.

I have the sense that her mother, or prior to the Great Depression really setting in, her parents domestic help (they lost all of their money in this time period) made porridge for the family and in large quantities. This is what you ate for breakfast and that was your option. . . period. This would have been real oatmeal, not quick oats.

Quick oats were introduced in 1922, so they were around when my mother was a kid, but that's not what they had.  They had real oatmeal.  I like real oatmeal, but I have the sense that my grandmother was a poor cook and my mother certain was.  I think my grandmother likely just boiled up a big batch of oatmeal and you ate it before you headed off to school in the morning, no matter when that was.

My father, on the other hand, never spoke of what they ate for breakfast, so I have no idea.  I wish I would have asked him.  He always drank a cup, just one, of coffee and it was always instant coffee.  He always had cereal for breakfast.  These were probably habits acquired early in life, and maybe that says something about what they ate in his parents homes.

My mother, when I was young, often tried to make breakfast which probably also reflects, to at least some degree, what the habit had been at home.  I've mentioned the oatmeal but she also made pancakes. They were generally awful.  Scrambled eggs was a favorite of hers as well, and she was fairly good at that and favored it herself her entire life. She never ate oatmeal.

Anyhow, after breakfast most people walked to work.  Not too many drove a century ago, although if we take the later part of my time frame, that was changing.

Walking, like riding a bike, puts you out in the air where you smell a lot of smells.  In the 10s and the 20s, prior to air-conditioning resulting in houses being all sealed up, that would have meant the cooking and stove smells of the houses you passed.  Indeed, the entire town would have smelled, to some degree, like coal smoke.

This town would have also smelled like an oil refinery, and when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, it did.  When I was a kid the town had three oil refineries.  Now it has one.  Two out of those three, however, were downwind from the town, and the only remaining one is. We never smell it.

Midwest Refinery, which became the Standard Oil Refinery, in Casper Wyoming shortly before its massive World War One expansion.

At the time, people would state that the smell was "the smell of money".  The upwind refinery was the largest of the three, but even then it wasn't anywhere near as large as it had once been.

I note this not as a criticism of anything, but rather to note something that would have  have been common in all sorts of places.  Indeed, in the 1910s and 1920s the town would have had three refineries and a stockyard which my family later owned.  Most of those were all downwind of the town but they were there and they would contribute to the atmosphere, so to speak, as well as to employment.

For that matter, Cheyenne has a refinery and did at the time.  It also had stockyards and a huge population of military horses.  Laramie also had stockyards and, yes, at that time a refinery.

Cooking smells, industrial smells and heating smells permeated every town and city everywhere.  And in the 1910 to 1920 period, the smell of animal waste was still a factor in daily life as a lot of things were still horse propelled.  Automobiles, and automobile smells, were just coming in, but cars and trucks hadn't replaced horses yet.

Union Pacific "Big Boy" locomotive.  These massive engines burned coal throughout their service life, never converting to oil like most steam engines.

And the major means of long distance transportation, locomotives, also had smells as at the time trains were all steam engines.  Oil fired steam engines had come in for the most part, although coal fired ones still existed, but they were smellier anyway you look at it than diesels, which replaced the steam engines in the 1940s and 50s, were.

If you walk downtown for work you would likely stay there for lunch, and that added, no doubt, to the downtown cooking smells.  We still have that, of course, but the town at that time had a lot of bars and restaurants and this helps explain why.  There was more need.  Office workers didn't have refrigerators in their offices and people who packed a lunch, and no doubt a lot of people did, ate fairly simple lunches.  But lots of people simply went out at noon for something to eat, with in most places some of them sitting down in a cafe, which most bars doubled as, and in others people grabbing something from a street vender, which were common at the time.  All of that, of course, added to urban smells.

And then late in the day, the walk home.

Exceedingly strange cigar advertisement, circa 1900.

Throughout it all was the smell of cigarettes and cigars, which were a huge item at the time in a way that we've now forgotten, even though that era has only recently passed.  Prior to World War One cigars were the dominant tobacco product, but the Great War brought cigarettes in.  Smoking, moreover, had been a male thing but now women were taking it up.

And then we have the people.

The people?

Yes. And that brings us to. . . plumbing.

We're so use to water being plumbed into the house that we nearly take it for granted.  Indeed, one of the real oddities of Western movies that were made prior to the late 60s, and even on into the 70s, is how clean everyone is all the time.  It's like they just took a shower and put on clean clothes.

They hadn't, most of time time.

Indeed, it wasn't until 1885 that a city in the United States had a comprehensive water system, that city being Chicago.

Prior to indoor plumbing, a pretty common practice for a lot of rural families was to bathe once a week.  That's actually more than some people like to commonly believe.  But it's a lot less than occurs now. Added to that, a lack of indoor plumbing was the norm on American farms and ranches into the 1930s.  If that sounds like a long time, a lack of indoor plumbing of some types, including toilets was the norm in rural Italy until the 1960s.

If you lack indoor plumbing taking a bath, and that's what it would be, can really only be accomplished in two ways.  One way is in an open body of water of some sort, another is a tub in the house of some sort.

By and large, in the era and society we're speaking of, people didn't wonder down to the river and take a bath once a week.  When stuff like that shows up in movies, it's mostly as an excuse to have an odd movie scene.  Having said that, in some regions near or what would become the United States this would occur outside of Indian populations, which of course had no other recourse for most of their history to any sort of other method.  The notable exception was the Hispanic populations along the Rio Grande.  While this falls outside of the area of our focus, we'll note it anyhow as it had an odd influence on American history.  In the 1840s, when American troops were first stationed along the Rio Grande, which was disputed territory with Mexico, they would routinely gather on the river to watch Mexican women, more notably young Mexican women, bathe.  Mexican authorities on the Mexican side of the river noticed this, and as they also noticed that Catholic troops were crossing the river to avail themselves of Mass on Sunday, it presented opportunities for them to induce desertion in the same way that Hessian troops were similarly induced during the Revolution. . . . free land. . . pretty girls. . . friendly population. . . .

Anyhow. . .

The first hotel in the US to have individual room plumbing was the Tremont in Boston which had that as a feature as early as 1829.

The modern toilet wasn't invented until 1910.

John Kohler, founder of the bath tub.  He died in 1900 at age 56, but his company lives on.

Swiss immigrant John Kohler, who worked in his father in law's iron business, got the bright idea of putting feat on a cast iron trough and calling it a "bathtub" in 1883.  The idea was a hit and by 1887 most of the company's output was in plumbing items.  Home bathing had arrived in a more modern fashion, but it wasn't until 1900 or so that house plans routinely featured indoor plumbing. That shows, in part, that cities and towns had put in water systems by that time, but it also shows that a lot of people were relying upon older methods of bringing water into houses at the turn of hte prior century.

Indeed, it wasn't until the 1920s that new homes routinely featured indoor plumbing including bathrooms with toilets and bathtubs.  It'd be a safe bet, however, that from 1900 until 1920, and then on into the 1930s, lots of houses were renovated for indoor plumbing.  By World War Two, however, indoor plumbing, including bathtubs were an American norm to such an extent that an entirely new concept of cleanliness existed in the United States, including expectations associated with it.

Indeed, this brings up an odd topic related to what we're discussing here that fits into the time period we're referencing.

"A french girl forming acquaintance with a soldier".  Lots of French girls would form such acquaintances during World War One and World War Two, but by and large American troops found France itself primitive and dirty in World War Two where as they did not in World War One.  Indeed, quite a few American troops brought home Russian brides from their service in Russia during World War One, where as they same population would have been regarded as hopelessly primitive by World War Two.

During World War One American soldiers were uniformly impressed with the French and romanticized the Italians.  Those troops who entered into Germany at the end of the war also were with the Germans, by and large, and to such an extent that American authorities had to take steps to keep American soldiers from getting too friendly with German civilians.

The story is different however, in regard to World War Two.  During World War Two Americans were glad to liberate the French but, both as to the rural French and the Italians, they were shocked by how "dirty" they were.  This is extremely common in regard with the Italians, whom by World War Two were regarded as absolutely primitive.  The view of the common French civilian wasn't very much different, even though that is rarely recalled today. Both were regarded as very dirty.  In contrast, Americans were by and large hugely impressed with German towns and civilians, who were often regarded as "clean like us". The exception were combat troops who had seen a lot of action against the Germans and troops who had participated in the liberation of concentration camps.  The latter troops detested the Germans, but not because they were dirty.

The reason this is of note is this. The French and Italians had not become dirty in the twenty years between World War One and World War Two.  They just hadn't introduced indoor plumbing at the same rates as Americans had.  For Americans, by World War Two, routine, and indeed daily, bathing had become the norm and indoor toiletry also was.  For rural Italians this wouldn't become the case until the 1960s.  For the French it likely did in the wake of World War Two, but it hadn't before that.*

So basically, what that tells us, is that it wasn't really until just about a century ago that the concept of daily bathing came in, in the U.S.  Indeed, it also tells us that in the 1910 to 1920 time frame plenty of people remained on the prior routine of a bath once a week.

Soap making company Jas S. Kirk of Chicago showing a munch of manly French soldiers mass bathing under the watchful eye of an officer.  They advertised as being soap and perfume makers and chemists. The connection between the three is an honest one and the soap industry employs a lot of chemists.  Indeed, I went to law school with a former soap company chemist whose job had been perfecting perfumes for soaps.

Now, we've already addressed this a little bit, but people have a smell.  People walking work will sweat.  People doing manual labor of some sort definitely will.  People around coal burning stoves will pick up the coal smell, just as people around wood burning stoves will pick up the wood smoke smell.  People around horses pick up their smell.  And people around clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke pick up that smell.

Now, people are, of course, cognizant of all of that, which is once again part of the reason that women wear perfume.  Perfume stinks.  Yes, I mean stinks, as in it has a stench.  It's stench is just supposed to be less vile than what the wearer would otherwise smell like, or at least be more ladylike.

Cologne advertisement from 1877.

Of course, by the time we're speaking of, and some time prior, men's cologne also existed, but I don't really know how far back.  It's a difficult subject to really research, but it appears that men's cologne's go back at least to the 19th Century as do the closely related "after shave" products. The latter had the purpose of being an antiseptic when shaving with straight razors posted a danger for infection, which in barbershops in less hygienic days it did.  Cologne however was just designed to cover your smell.

While we haven't researched it, it's probably safe to say that women used perfume a great deal more than men used cologne and, by this point in time, aftershave.  Indeed, cologne and aftershave are nearly things of the past now and when I run into them, I'm always surprised.  Men wearing something smelly of that type has crossed into the effete, which wasn't the case in stinkier times, but I suspect that most of the time most men, at any point in time, didn't use cologne.  Most women probably occasionally used perfume, which in fact was once a common gift for women.  Having said that, in an era when the majority of women didn't work outside the home, most of them probably didn't wear it most days either.

In speaking of perfume, of course, we're speaking about applying the smelly stuff directly to oneself, but it's in a lot of soaps. 

Commercial soap of the type we are familiar with was, oddly enough, a product of World War One and was a German innovation. That's when detergent type soaps came in and started to replace soaps made of fats and lye, which were the norm before that.

Soapine advertisement from 1900.  It used good old fashioned whale fat.

Today, most soaps are detergent based soaps, having followed the German innovation, but not all are.  Some eclectic folks still use really old fashioned lye based soaps, and one really old soap brand, Ivory, is still around.  I like Ivory as its devoid of perfumes.

Ivory soap ad from 1898.  It's been the same since 1879.

Soaps like Ivory don't have a noticeable smell, which is one of the things that are nice about them.  But the norm with commercial soaps is to add perfume to them. We don't even notice it unless we're sensitive to perfumes (and I am).  Lye soap, on the other hand, has a definite smell to it and people who use it alot smell like it.

Something that has a smell, as it is perfumed, are deodorants and antiperspirants. These were not introduced until the 1960s but went on to rapid general acceptance thereafter.  Interestingly, I can recall there being a little bit of a negative reaction to it in some quarters, some of which was perhaps prescient.  For example, I can recall my father's friend Father Bauer, who shared a common rural Nebraska childhood with my father, commenting on how things were declining and referencing it, looking back on a day, in his recollection, when you could tell that a man at the end of the day had worked a hard honest day by the smell of his sweat.  

People would take exception to that now, but there is something to it.  Since that time we've gone from one male grooming product to another, to the point where it's really fairly effete and absurd.

We've been talking, of course, about personal hygiene, but part of that story involves washing clothing.  We've douched on this before, but not in depth.  It was part of our examination on how domestic machinery revolutionized work for women, and therefore we really did't need to look at it much beyond that. Suffice it to say, clothes washing was incredibly laborious work, and it mostly fell to women.  We noted there, in part:

So I'm covering old ground here, but a century ago, "steam laundries" were a big deal as they had hot water and steam.  You could create that in your own home, of course, but it was a chore.  A chore, I might note, that many women (and it was mostly women) endured routinely, but many people, for various reasons, made use of steam laundries when they could.

Women working in a commercial laundry.  Laundry workers were often female or, oddly enough, Chinese immigrants.

Working in a laundry, we'd note, was hard grueling work, but it was also one of the few jobs open to women, all lower class economically women, at the time.

Laundry workers and suffragettes marching, 1914.

Of course, women, and again it was mostly women, did do laundry at home as well, which was also hard, grueling, work.

Pearline, a laundry soap, advertisement from the 1910s which urged parents to "train up" children to use it.

In short, washing clothes, as we've dealt with elsewhere in other contexts, was a pain.  That meant you washed less often, quite frankly.

That might not have been that big of a deal, particularly if you could take your clothes to the steam laundry, if you had a lot of clothes, but people didn't.

Washing machines are a really recent domestic machine. They're so common now that we don't even think of them, but the electric washing machine wasn't patented unil 1904. Before that, people were washing at home, but by hand.  Sales of electric washing machines exploded in the 1920s and remained strong, if reduced, during the Great Depression.  And no wonder.  As we've noted, they had an impact not only on domestic work, but what people wore.

For our discussion, this matters as it it related to, once again, smell.  People had fewer changes of clothes and washing them was hard.  Outerwear, like wool coats and vest worn daily, were rarely cleaned.  Shirts, socks and undergarments were.  In that context, celluloid collars, which seem so strange to us today, made sense.  Collars on white shirts really stain. They really, really stain if you wear the same shirt for several days in a row.  Detachable collars could easily be scrubbed clean and if you had several collars you could wear the shirt for several days, with coat over it as was typically the case, longer.

"Wash Days" were a common feature of domestic life, with that typically being a week day.  That weekly "wash day" is still pretty common, but it doesn't mean what it once did.   The scrubbing and hard work, followed by hanging things on a line, or perhaps a rack, aren't at all what they once were.

So what does this leave us with?

Well, clearly, there were a lot more smells to encounter in 1910, or 1920, than there are now.  But, by the same token, we hardly notice most of the smells we encounter now.  If we were transported back in time a century, we'd notice the smells immediately, as they'd be so strong, and out of our daily experience, today.  But did they then?

Probably not.