Tomatoland

Tomatoland

An interesting NPR interview of an author on the tasteless industrial tomato.

He also details labor abuses.

It  is pretty disturbing, and if it doesn't convince you to grow your own, you're probably unusually resistant to disturbing news.

One things, though, is that the interview, while not on immigrant labor and farming, makes it pretty clear that the system depends on using, and abusing, immigrant farm workers.  A partial solution to this sort of thing, although one nobody ever seems willing to consider, is ending the practice of importing agricultural labor.  We didn't do that until World War Two, when we had to.  Before that, we did it ourselves, with our own population.

We have plenty of Americans to do the job, and having seen many absolutely rotten jobs Americans will do, the thesis that you "can't get Americans" to do this job is a fraud on the public.  What you can't do is to get them to work for substandard wages, in substandard conditions. And they shouldn't have to do that either.

Paying Americans humane wages to do a job in humane conditions would put a lot of Americans to work in an outdoor job and connect them with agriculture and the real world.  It would raise the cost of food, but perhaps its unrealistically low priced to start with to some extent, on some items.  Of course, we'd have to actually guard our borders from the import of food produced poorly by those paying the poor, poor wages, but so be it.

The Best Posts of the Week of August 7, 2011

Prejudice

Prejudice

Church in New Mexico, early 1940s.

I've been thinking of trying to find a way to post this topic for awhile, but I hadn't gotten around to it, and I also hadn't quite figured out a way to post it effectively.

The topic is prejudice, but not racial prejudice. Religious bias may be a better way to phrase it.

Americans today are so used to the concept that the country was founded on religious liberty that they don't really question it. There remains religious prejudice in this, and every, country to be sure, but the way it was ingrained in society was once much greater than it is now.

To be more specific, I recently saw a topic concerning Roman Catholics and university attendance. The specific topic was the GI Bill. In the topic, a second hand citation to Catholics attending university in the time period was mentioned. More specifically, it was mentioned that prior to World War Two very few Catholics attended university. One of the people responding to that post found that assertion to be just ridiculous, but there were first hand recollections cited to support it (including mine).

I think that actually is correct, and it taps into the general theme of the website here. We look back at our country and figure, except for certain big historical facts that are generally known, that we share much in common with those who came before us. This is simply not always true. And this is one of the ways in which it was not true.

It has been frequently debated whether or not the country was founded on religious principals, and while it can be well supported that the country was not a theocracy in any fashion, it generally had some unity of religious thought, very loosely, early on. To call it a Christian republic might be too strong, but to call it a republic founded largely by Protestant Christians would not be. Generally, up until the 1840s, most Americans belonged to only one of several Protestant denominations. This made sense, of course, as most Americans descended from one of only several ethnic groups, and very early in the our history (our colonial history) immigration had been restricted to exclude members of other faiths, generally. Or more specifically, immigration had excluded Catholics.

This wasn't the case after we severed our allegiance to the United Kingdom, but still, it wasn't really up until the Irish Potato Famine got rolling, and the revolutions of the 1840s in Europe occurred, that this began to change. At that time, a lot of Irish immigrants began to come into the country and, at the same time, a lot of Germans from the Catholic regions of Germany began to do the same. An identifiable Catholic population existed in the US for the first time, excluding of course Acadians and Louisianans, who had been in it for a very long time, but in isolated pockets. Mexican Americans too, fit this latter description.

Prejudice ran strong against these new immigrants, particularly against the Irish immigrants who were inclined to congregate in cities. Prejudice against German Catholics also existed, but the German immigrants were much more inclined to strike out for German farming enclaves where English speaking Americans were less likely to encounter them. In regards to Irish immigrants, however, prejudice was so strong that they were typically defined as a "race", much like African Americans were and are.

Things began to change for Irish Americans during the Mexican War. During the war they were strongly represented (as were German Americans) in the Army, and that helped ease feelings against them. Still, lingering prejudice against Irish Americans well into the 20th Century. And immigration by Italian Americans, which came around the turn of the 19th Century, once again brought in what was regarded as a strongly alien, Catholic, population.

These populations, to a large degree, were much more isolated and communal in the American population until after World War Two. This varied by region, to be sure, but to a surprising degree these Catholic ethic communities remained segregated wherever they lived in a substantial urban area. And everywhere they were strongly associated, and self associated, with their church. Ecumenism was much less valued as well, so identification by Faith meant a great deal. This still occurs, but prior to World War Two to identify as a member of any one Faith, and most people did, meant a fairly strong allegiance to it.

These Catholic populations, the evidence seems to support to me, were also almost exclusively working class. In most urban areas Roman Catholics worked in laboring endeavors. In rural areas of the West, they were often ranchers. I can't really say much about rural areas elsewhere. There were always Catholics in the professions, such as law and medicine, but their clients were more concerned about Faith than they would be now. This is also true, fwiw, for African Americans, who had black doctors and black lawyers surprisingly early on, but those black lawyers and doctors had black clients.

In this era working class men had a much easier time making a living for a family than they do now. Laboring jobs were never easy, but they did often pay a living wage, if they were for skilled labor. A much smaller percentage of Americans attended college or university in general. Generally, Catholics did not attend. Some did, but not anywhere the percentage that now does.

World War Two seems to have changed all of that. It was likely changing anyway. Well before World War Two the nation had seen its first Roman Catholic Supreme Court justice (a Southern Confederate veteran). A Roman Catholic had attempted an unsuccessful, but serious, run for the Presidency prior to the war. General Terry de le Mesa Allen, a Roman Catholic, and Gen. Keyes, also a Catholic, had long running Army careers by the time World War Two broke out and they'd commanded large number of men. For that matter, Gen. McClellan of Civil War fame was a Catholic. But the war seemed to break an already breaking log jam, and after the war identification by class or religion was no longer a statistical factor in college attendance. By the 60s, Ivy League colleges that had effectively been Protestant schools were abandoning chapel requirements, thereby opening them up to members of non Protestant faiths.

In mentioning all of this, I'm not seeking to start a debate. But it is interesting to note. Religious tolerance has always been a feature of American life, but how religion has been a factor in culture and even employment has been largely forgotten.

St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Cheyenne Wyoming.

On Holscher's Hub, French Frigate Shoals.

French Frigate Shoals.

The Old Homesteads

I went to a ash spreading (i.e., a type of funeral really) out at an old homestead the other day. By 4x4, it was a long way out. Long, long way, or so it felt. I learned while there that the original homestead had first been filed and occupied in 1917, a big year for homesteading.

It was a very interesting place, and felt very isolated. In visiting about that with my father in law, however, he noted that there had been another homestead just over the hill. And, as I've likely noted here before, there were tiny homesteads all over at that time. It was isolated, but sort of locally isolated. There were, as there were with most of these outfits, another homestead just a few hours ride away, at most, if that.

That is not to say that they weren't way out. I'd guess that this place was at least a full days ride from the nearest town at that time. Even when cars were commonly owned, and they were coming in just about that time, it would have taken the better part of a day to get to town, or a town (there were a couple of very small, but viable towns, about equal distance to this place at that time). It's interesting how agricultural units everywhere in North American have become bigger over time, even if they are all closer now, in terms of time, to a city or town.

Communications and Road Miles

I had a fairly typical experience, and a bit of an odd experience, yesterday which calls to mind the topic of this blog.

Yesterday I went to my office, then to Sheridan Wyoming, then to Ranchester Wyoming, and back.

On the way to Ranchester, we passed two Rolls Royce touring cars. The Silver Ghost type of car, really old ones. They were, of course, premium touring cars in their day, which would have been basically the years on both sides of World War One. Huge automobiles.

The trip basically entailed about 170 miles of travel one way, or a grand trip, in one day of about 300 or so miles. We were home by dinner.

On the way back, I pulled over by the Midwest exit where there was cell reception to make a work call to an attorney in Gillette, WY. My son took this photograph while I was doing that.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well, in a century's time, communications and travel have been so revolutionized that they've radically impacted the way those in my field, in this location, do business. A century ago I would not have taken a day trip to Sheridan and Ranchester. For that matter, while I could easily have gone from Sheridan to Ranchester, most summers, a century ago, that would likely have pretty much been a day trip in and of itself. No, an attorney, if he ever had any cause to go to Sheridan from Casper, would have taken a train. Most likely, you'd take the train up one day, and back the next.

A very adventurous person, if they owned a car, might have driven up to Sheridan, but it would have taken all day. And you would have stayed upon arriving.

This year, I suspect, the travel by car of that type, on roads of that era, would have been impossible. Everything is flooding. I doubt a person could have driven in these conditions from Sheridan to Ranchester. You might have had to take the train to do that. The rail line does run though both towns, then up to Garryowen, and on to Billings. It did then as well.

Even in the mid 20th Century this would have been a long road trip, but you could have done it in a day.

But even the telephone aspect of this didn't exist when I first practiced law, some 20 years ago. That's entirely new. It effectively makes your car your office. As internet connections continue to improve, very often you have internet service darned near everywhere for that matter.

An improvement, or just the way things are?

Knowing, or not, what we think we know.

An old thread, now revived, on SMH.

This thread fits in well with this blog, and is almost the theme of it. But, in general, how much do we really know of the routine of any one era? News tends to feature the rare, unusual, uncommon, or noteworthy, not the ordinary. But news in some ways tends to be what ends up being recorded as history.

The story of German horse use during World War Two is a good example. In popular histories, it tends to be reported that the German army of WWII was a mechanized, modern army. That's partially true, but to a much greater extent it was a hiking and horse using army. By war's end, it was the least mechanized army fighting in Europe.

Why is that not often noted? Well, the German propaganda machine would have had no interest in noting that, and every interest in emphasizing mechanization. Allied reports, for their part, would have emphasized the terrifying and dramatic. So, our view is not entirely accurate from the common sources.

Social and Cultural History and Film

I just posted a thread on this topic on SMH.

Repeating the topic here, I was wondering anyone who happens to stop in here might think in terms of what movies are particularly accurate in depicting any one historical setting.

I'm not restricting this to military films at all, as I noted on SMH, but films in general. And I'm not restricting this to a film about anyone era. Just what films do we here think did a particularly good job in this context?

War Horse

A thread about the horse behind the horse on SMH.

Remembering what places were like

An interesting edition of the Casper Star Tribune's history column appeared this week, under the title "Routines Disrupted". The following caught my attention, showing what the town was like early in the 20th Century. It's easy to imagine everything being slower paced and more relaxed, and easy to forget the atmosphere that actually prevailed at the time:

Because the city authorities stopped them from selling liquor and insisted that there must be no more piano thumping in their houses, the landladies of the bawdy houses of Casper held an indignation meeting one day last week and decided to suspend business entirely, and accordingly all the inmates of the three places on David street were discharged on the first of the month and Saturday morning fifteen of them left town on the east-bound train, it is hoped to return no more.

“These people got the notion in their head that they could do just as they pleased so long as they remained in the restricted district, and high carnival was held nearly every night for awhile, and it was seldom that a big fight was not pulled off by some of them two or three times a week. They caused the authorities so much trouble that it kept one man on watch nearly every night to quell the disturbance. But after tolerating it until it could be tolerated no longer, the order was given out to cut out the booze and the music, and this made the madams mad and they have closed up their houses, and threaten to ‘kill the town.’ ...

“[I]f the places are ever opened up again, which they undoubtedly will be before the end of this week if they are permitted to do so, the people should, and no doubt will, insist that the places be conducted along lines that will not disturb the decent people of the town.”

Food and diet

It's really easy to romanticize the past, including the kitchen table of the past, but a recent Freakanomics podcast I listened to suggests that some caution should be involved in that. That's no surprise really, but it is something that we rarely consider.

In our minds, the table of the past was always the place where home cooked meals were served, with fresh food of all kinds. But this really wasn't so. For one thing, refrigeration was not really terribly advanced until the 1930s or so. Prior to that, a lot of people had an "ice box". My father still referred to the refrigerator at the "ice box" in the 1970s, not really switching over to "refrigerator" until the 80s. An ice box isn't anywhere as efficient as a refrigerator.

People compensated for that by buying food every day, but that couldn't really take care of the entire problem. Fresh food simply isn't available every day, everywhere. Frozen food wasn't really fully available year around. Canned food was, in the 20th Century of course, but it wasn't always as good as the canned food we have now. Salted and pickled food made up for part of the problem.

And food variety was necessarily much more restricted. It isn't as if you could expect to buy oranges everywhere easily prior to relatively efficient transportation. Something like a Kiwi fruit would have been unheard of. Even when I was a kid fish came from the river or from a box in the freezer section of the grocery store. In the early 20th Century here fish would have been from the river, and that's about it.

Food related diseases, such as rickets and goiter, that are attributable to a simple dietary deficiencies. Vitamin D is now put in milk to address rickets, but when most people bought milk in glass bottles that was from a local creamery, this wasn't true. Iodine is now in salt, but it wasn't always.

In looking at images from the past, a full farm larder is easy to imagine. But that isn't always the way things were.

An interesting look at an aspect of this, in military terms, is on this Society of the Military Horse thread.

The distance of things, and self segregation

Sometimes its helpful to actually know what I'm writing about (d'oh!).

In the post The Distance of Things I commented on how remarkably close in proximity Mother of God, Holy Ghost, and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception are, and were not, in terms of transportation in earlier times.

Well, they are close now, to be sure, but Mother of God Church was not a Catholic Church until about 1949, so my analysis there fell sort of flat. Of course, Holy Ghost and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception have always been Catholic Church's, so my analysis still made sense there.

Be that as it may, another church also provides an interesting example of changing times, that being Holy Rosary. Holy Rosary is probably no more than five miles, maybe less, from the Cathedral, but it's north of I70, and it would be hard for people in the neighborhood to get to the Cathedral even now, so I can understand why it is there. Having said that, what surprised me is that, in reading the parish history, how ethnic it originally was.

The church, built in 1918, originally served a principally South Slavs population. Another Catholic Church existed within just a few blocks, but it was principally Polish in population. Prior to the construction of Holy Rosary, the South Slavs attended that church, but they wanted one of their own. That's probably understandable given language differences between the various parishioners. Of interest, a Russian Orthodox Church was and is located very nearby.

What all this shows is that there was a rich population of Eastern Europeans in this section of Denver early in the 20th Century. They all lived in the same area, but they also maintained certain distinctions between themselves. Overall, that's not surprising, but the degree to which the distinctions were maintained perhaps is.

Occasionally, things throw back.

Great video.

The distance of things.

I was in Denver the past couple of days, and on my way out, I took some photographs for my blog on churches in the West.

I've been to Denver approximately a billion times. But trying to find photographs on a particular topic really focuses in your attention on some things. More on that later, but one thing I noted is that you can find multiple churches of a single denomination relatively close to each other, in modern terms.

For example,the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Denver, is really relatively close to Holy Ghost, a fine old church (which I did not get to photograph) in downtown Denver. If I lived in downtown Denver, I'd probably have to drive to the Cathedral for Mass, but it isn't far. Nor are either of these far, in driving terms, from Mother of God Catholic Church which is just on the edge of downtown Denver. It's a very small church.

In any event, these churches are all so close to each other, in modern terms, that I can't imagine all three being built now. All three are still in use. I was perplexed by it, until in considering it, I realized that they are really neighborhood churches, built for communities that were walking to Mass for the most part, save for the Cathedral, which no doubt served that function, but which also was the seat of the Archdiocese of Denver. Mother of God church no doubt served a Catholic community right in that neighborhood, and it likely still does. Holy Ghost served a downtown community, and probably also the Catholic business community that was downtown during the day.

This speaks volumes about how people got around prior to World War Two. It probably also says something about their concept of space.

Here's another example. Depicted here, one time close up, and a second time from down the street, is the Burlington Northern train depot. It's still a train depot, but it only serves to be the headquarters for the BNSF locally now. At one time, of course, passengers got on and off the train here. A friend recently sent me a very interesting article describing that process, and how passengers got off and went to a nearby, now gone, restaurant. For that matter, at least three major hotels were located within a couple of blocks of the depot, one of which is the Townsend, now converted into a courthouse.

Best Posts of the Week for the Week of February 20, 2011

The distance of things.

Nice Post on what every American should learn about U.S. History

Very fine post on what every American should learn about U.S. History.

I'm often amazed by how little people know about the history of our nation. Nice to see somebody in the trenches considering it.

Heating

I'm reminded, semi painfully, of a major change in the last century being heating.

I don't know how the winter has been elsewhere, but here it's been a really cold winter. We've been down below OF repeatedly, including today.

Our house has electric heat. I actually like it quite a bit, but it's been having trouble keeping up in the really cold weather. Most houses around here have gas heat.

Most office buildings, if they're big ones like the one I work in, have a boiler. Ours has a boiler, but for some reason it's having trouble today.

This building was built in about 1917 or so. Not much insulation in it. When the heat isn't working, it's real darned cold in it.

For that matter, it was probably pretty cool in it back in the day during the winter, which is likely why men wore so much wool for office work in those days.

Office machinery and the written word.

Just recently, I resumed using the Dragon voice recognition system for dictation. For those not familiar with it, it's a program that jacks into your computer, and you speak into a microphone
which then processes the spoken word immediately into print. This is the second time I've experimented with. The first time, I grew frustrated with it and, after the system collapsed, I abandoned using it and simply typed things out on my computer. I'm a pretty fast typist, so this was working well, but any way you look at it, it's slower than speaking. This time around, the Dragon system seems to be working very well, so I've very happy with my resumed use of it.

Anyhow, what a revolution in the process of generating pleadings and letters this is. When I first started practicing law, some 21 years ago, we were using Dictaphones. Now those are practically a thing of the past. For those not familiar with them, a Dictaphone is a specialized tape recorder that allows the speaker to dictate the document. This ended up, at that time, in an audiotape which was handed over to the secretary, who then listened to it and typed out the document. The secretary handed that back to you, and then you manually red lined it for changes. This process could take some time.

This, of course, was an improved process of dictation as compared to the original one, which entailed calling a secretary in to your office and dictating the document to her. She took it down in shorthand. My mother, who had worked as a secretary in the 40s, 50s and 60s, could take excellent shorthand as a result of this process. Now, shorthand is nearly as dead of written language as Sanskrit.

Even earlier than that, legal documents were processed through a scrivener, a person whose job was simply to write legibly. That person wasn't normally the lawyer.

I'm not sure if this entire process is really quicker than the older methods, but it is certainly different. My secretary only rarely sees a rough draft of anything. That rough draft goes on my computer, and I edit it from there. About 80% of the time, by the time I have a secretary proof read a document, it is actually ready to go. Those entering the secretarial field, for that matter, generally no longer know how to take shorthand or even how to work the Dictaphone machine. They're excellent, however, on working the word process features of a computer.


All this also means, fwiw, that the practice of law, at least, is a much more solitary profession than it once was, at least while in the office. Generating a pleading, in a prior era, was more of a community effort in a way. The lawyer heard the pleading for the first time, in many instances, as the same time his secretary did. Over time, most secretaries were trusted to make comments on the pleadings. In the case of letters, they were often simply expected to be able to write one upon being asked to do so, something that still occurs to some degree today. But for pleadings, today, a lawyer tends to wall himself off by himself while drafting them, and any outside input tends to start after a relatively complete document has been drafted. Of course, with computers, it's much easier to circulate drafts and to change documents as needed.

What one building says about the march of history.

This is the Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse in Casper, Wyoming. I recently posted these photographs of it on my courthouse blog.

In doing this, it occurred to me that this building, in many ways, symbolizes how many changes have come about in the last 80 years.

This building was built under appropriations set out in 1926, but actual construction did not start until 1931. It was completed in 1932. The building, therefore, came early in the Great Depression.

The ceremony for the corner stone included a Masonic Ceremony. That's an amazing fact in and of itself. A Masonic Ceremony would be regarded as unthinkable now for a Federal event, and it probably generated some concern amongst the Catholic lawyers in town at the time. The Masons, however, were quite powerful in Casper in this era, and of course fraternal organizations of all type were much more common then as opposed to now.

The building itself was not built with just the judiciary in mind. Indeed, there was no sitting Federal judge for it at all. At the time, there was one Federal judge who sat in Cheyenne. He was, however, a bit of a circuit rider, and Federal courthouses existed in Cheyenne, Casper, Green River, Lander and Yellowstone National Park. The courtroom was on the second floor of the courthouse, and the main floor and part of the basement housed the Post Office. Service recruiters were also located here, along with other Federal officers. The building was built with this in mind, and it served in this fashion up until about 1970 when a new much larger Federal office building was constructed. This itself shows how much smaller the Federal government actually was, as there is no way this building could serve in this fashion today. Even as late as the early 80s, however, the building still housed various Federal offices, including the United States Geological Survey, for which I briefly worked. It's odd to think that the dingy basement USGS office was once located in what is now a very nice courthouse. Even odder yet is to recall the beautiful Depression Era murals that were once on the main floor, with the mail boxes. The murals depicted scenes of Western migration, and were removed to the new post office (which is now the old post office) when the post office went to the new Federal Building in 1970.

What this courthouse did not see by that time was very much use as a court. By the 1950s at least the Federal Court made little use of this courthouse, and the ones in Green River and Lander had fallen into near complete disuse. In part, this may simply have been due to advances in transportation and technology. The addition of additional Federal judges, however, meant that the court needed to once again use this courthouse, and it was remodeled in the late 1980s and now has a sitting Federal judge.

Even the name of the building illustrates a change. This building was simply called "the Post Office" by most people here when I was young. Later, it was called "the old Post Office". When it acquired a sitting Federal judge most people started calling it The Federal Courthouse. The official name, the Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse, came about in honor of long time Wyoming Federal judge, Ewing T. Kerr. Judge Kerr is notable, amongst other reasons, for being the last Wyoming Federal judge to lack a law degree. He had never attended law school, and actually started off as a teacher. He "read the law" and passed the bar.

By the way, just behind the courthouse is the old First National Bank building. It hasn't been used in that fashion during my lifetime, I think, but was a major office building up until the 1970s. It then fell into disuse, and was abandoned for many years. Very recently, it was remodeled into appointments, and where the bank lobby once was a grocery store now is.

Also, this view is considerably more open than at any time prior to the present time. A small building neighboring the courthouse was recently removed so that room could be made for parking. They heavy iron fence serves a security purpose. Up until recently this also did not exist, showing, I suppose, how things have changed in another fashion.

365 Days With A Model A.

Here's a blog that takes an interesting look at the early automobile era.

The author notes that this is because he doesn't feel that everything should have a computerized element to it. I couldn't agree more.