National Women's Party commences White House protest

The picketers would until June 1919, with police interruption.

Exposition. L'architecture régionale dans les provinces envahies du 10 janvier au 10 février 1917

A regional architecture show slated to run a month in France.  Odd thing to think of, what with the war raging.

Courting

Sometimes, when you start an article like this, you don't end up where you expected.  This is one such example.

 Young couple, 1910s or 1920s by appearance of clothing.

Lex Anteinternet: Ancestry.com: 11 Skills Your Great-Grandparents H...:  Here's another entry from Ancestry.com with some interesting items: 11 Skills Your Great-Grandparents Had That You Don’t.  I started to run through some of these awhile back and post on the, and then frankly some of them got incorporated into other thread.  Here's one that I flat out haven't posted on, but perhaps I should.  "Courting".

The Ancestry item stated the following:

1. Courting

While your parents and grandparents didn’t have the option to ask someone out on a date via text message, it’s highly likely that your great-grandparents didn’t have the option of dating at all. Until well into the 1920s, modern dating didn’t really exist. A gentleman would court a young lady by asking her or her parents for permission to call on the family. The potential couple would have a formal visit — with at least one parent chaperone present — and the man would leave a calling card. If the parents and young lady were impressed, he’d be invited back again and that would be the start of their romance.

This may seem trivial, but if you think of it, it truly isn't.  Wars come and go, political movements rise and fall, but the interaction between men and women, in spite of the confusion some such as Justice Kennedy may have about it, is truly eternal and crosses all cultures at all time.

Which means that changes in the culture regarding this are huge in implication, but which also likely means that some things change less than we might at first suppose.  Let's take a look at this (and please add comments if you have any), and let's focus in the era that the blog supposedly focuses on and which we've been focusing on to some degree recently.  It'll be interesting to see what changes there have been, what the norm was and is, and what that means (maybe).

And let's start with average marriage age:

 Year

	Males	Females
1890	26.1	22.0
1900	25.9	21.9
1910	25.1	21.6
1920	24.6	21.2
1930	24.3	21.3
1940	24.3	21.5
1950	22.8	20.3
1960	22.8	20.3
1970	23.2	20.8
1980	24.7	22.0
1990	26.1	23.9
1993	26.5	24.5
1994	26.7	24.5
1995	26.9	24.5
1996	27.1	24.8
1997	26.8	25.0
1998	26.7	25.0
1999	26.9	25.1
2000	26.8	25.1
2001	26.9	25.1
2002	26.9	25.3
2003	27.1	25.3
2005	27.0	25.5
2006	27.5	25.9
2007	27.7	26.0
2008	27.6	25.9
2009	28.1	25.9
2010	28.2	26.1

Hmmm. . . not quite as big of change as you might have supposed, I'm guessing. Correct?

Indeed, I'm betting you were thinking that the average marriage age in 1890, when this table started, was probably in the teens for girls/women and just above that for men.  Well, not so much.  It was 22 years of age for women, and in 2010 it it was 26.1.  An an increase of four years, which is significant I'll admit.  For men it was 26.1 and now its 28.2.  An increase of only two years (but which is telling in other ways).  For 1920, the year closest to 1916 and 1917, which we've been focusing on, the average male age for marriage was 24.6 (a slight depression from what it had been in 1910) and it was 21.2 for women, a drop in age 1890 and from 1910, for that matter, although only slightly.  Something was going on there.

Why are we starting here, by the way?  Well, that's telling because that's the direction that courting or dating, or whatever, leads.  Or, as the school ground rhyme in common circulation for generations goes:

[Name] and [Name]

sitting in a tree,

K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

First comes love,

then comes marriage,

then comes baby

in a baby carriage

Or, if you prefer Sinatra, the barely altered lyrics from the playground The Kissing Song to Love and Marriage.

Love and marriage, love and marriage

They go together like a horse and carriage

This I tell you, brother

You can't have one without the other.

Love and marriage, love and marriage

It's an institute you can't disparage

Ask the local gentry

And they will say it's elementary

Try, try, try to separate them

It's an illusion

Try, try, try, and you will only come

To this conclusion.

Love and marriage, love and marriage

Go together like a horse and carriage

Dad was told by mother

You can't have one, you can´t have none

You can't have one without the other

Try, try, try to separate them

It's an illusion

Try, try, try, and you will only come

To this conclusion

Love and marriage, love and marriage

They go together like the horse and carriage

Dad was told by mother

You can't have one, you can´t have none

You can't have one without the other

No sir.

A lot of pop sociology would have you believe that a century ago everyone was on their way to being married by 18, if not younger.  Well, whatever the process was, that clearly wasn't the result.  Indeed, for reasons that we'll get into below, while there were undoubtedly some young marriages, the upper limit for marriage was likely quite a bit older, especially in some demographics, than generally supposed.

Well, that's marriage, let's get back to how those men and women got married.  Let's discuss courting.

And we'll do that by first discussing dating.

Now, I know that sounds counter-intuitive, based on what we started off with above, but it isn't, as that's the process we're actually generally familiar with.  If there's a change, we need to start with what we know to know what the change was from.  It's evolved a great deal over the years but not so much that its not fairly recognizable throughout its history, which gets back to the fact that the close attention to this sort of thing tends to overemphasize changes to some degree.

Dating is a process by which, in very general terms, young men and young women self identify somebody they are interested in and "ask them out".  The process is generally under the control of the actor, rather than somebody else, but this may be less the case than people sometimes suggest, depending upon the circumstances.  Certainly in the case of young people on their own, or largely on their own, they act relatively independently in making these actions.  Usually (although not always) a young man identifies an young woman he's interested in, and approaches her and asks if she'd like to go do something. Attend a movie, go to lunch, whatever.  That's pretty much what the initiation of dating is like.  Some sociologists, or perhaps pop sociologists, will claim that the young no longer date, but that's bunkus.  Learned or allegedly learned people who maintain that do so as they have an odd view that dating was defined in reality by the 1970s series Happy Days. Apparently they never saw The Best Years of Our Lives, which would be a more instructive cinematic portrayal.

Dating, as an institution (if it is one) or as social behavior, had its common spread, as noted, in the 1920s and not largely before (although its dangerous to take that too far).  The reason that it came into play at that time had to do with the increase in education, and not just at the college level, although that played a big part of that.  Starting in the 1920s there was a notable increase, although nothing like that after World War Two, of young people, male and female, attending college and university.  Indeed, the joke about young women going to college for their "Mrs Degree" probably originates at about that time and was even barely hanging on, albeit barely, when I went to university in the 1980s.  Anyhow, as universities were remote from where people grew up, usually, that meant that you had a population ranging from the late teens to the early 20s that was living away from home and therefore the traditional Courting, which we will get to in a moment, didn't quite make sense and they had to act, somehow, on their own.  More on that later.

I'd note before we go on, however, that this same era saw an increase in people going all the way through high school. We're so used to this now that we just assume it always was, but that is very much not the case.  Even in the 1940s somewhat less than half of all Americans did not graduate from high school   Sticking it out through high school is really a post World War Two phenomenon.  However, attending high school had become common by the early 20th Century, which isn't necessarily the case for earlier eras and with each passing year more people stuck it out.  This tends to be missed in the stories about Dating and Courting but that plays a real role in the story.  Prior to this being common, young women were part of their households quite  early, but not out in public the way that they were in school. The same is true for young men.

And, added to that, as we will shortly see in this month's late month's post, employment of the young in industry of all types, male and female, was seeing a big increase in this era as well. That had a similar impact on this story to school.  Again, in a rural, and perhaps even agrarian, society people didn't move around much, and tended to know the people they knew, whom their parents also knew.  But if you were working in Boston as a teenager in an office. . . well.

Teenage worker, about 15.  She'll appear again later this month.  Probably in her case she's an Irish immigrant and school is over for her.

Teenage office boy, a very common employment for smart young men who were not attending school.  I'm not saying that the young man here and the young woman above were dating, but I am saying that young men in this situation and young girls in the photograph above were meeting each other in a context outside of being residents of neighboring farms.  Again, this young man will appear again later this month.

Added to that, it was also the case that the American population has always been a lot more mobile than people tend to recall now.  People like to imagine that up until some time recent, say the 60s or 70s, everyone grew up in the same town and always stayed there.  In truth, in the United States, there was always a significant element of the population for whom that wasn't true.

For example, in the American West the population tended to be all immigrants, if only internal immigrants by majority, well into the 20th Century and Wyoming remains peculiarly prone to this as 55% of the state's population came in from somewhere else.  In 1916 it would have probably been something like 70% or higher.  In the 1890s almost everyone, save for the Indians, had come in from somewhere else. Some of these, to be sure, were entire families that moved in, but an awful lot of these people were young men and young women (far more men than women) that had immigrated to this region.  The traditional concept of courting, which we haven't really gotten into yet, obviously wasn't going to work for these people and rather what they did to meet each other was much more akin to what we'd call dating.

By way of a personal example of this, my paternal grandfather was from Dyersville Iowa but left there at age 13.  When he married he was living in Denver, Colorado.  I'm not sure of the details of how he met my paternal grandfather, but I know that it wasn't through a process exactly like that mentioned above.  Rather, I suspect he met my grandmother at Mass and the relationship started there, but his parents would have had no role in that and its likely his parents never met her parents, ever.

Likewise, in big cities there were huge populations of immigrants, and they were often young without their parents. Again, by way of a personal example, my father's grandmother came from Ireland at age 3, with her sister who was 19.  The family could only afford to send two people out of Ireland, so t hey sent the youngest and the oldest, figuring that was giving the youngest a good chance at life and that her 19 year old sister was older enough to take care of her, which she did.  Both married in the United States.  I have no idea how they ended up in Denver, but again, their parents not only didn't play a role in their "courtship", they never saw their parents again. . . ever.

All of which might go to suggest that the traditional concept of "courtship" and "courting" might be off the mark to some degree, as well as that as a revolutionary change to "dating".  While there was definitely a change, and we don't dispute that, the basis for that change was not only much broader than generally claimed but it also went back quite a bit further than people imagine.  That is, it's nice, or repressive, depending upon your view and whether you are a sociologist, to imagine a world which, prior to the 1920s, every young introduction was arranged by the family according to a rigid set of rules, but it just isn't true.  Something did change, but the degree to which you'd recognize it would depend a lot on your place in society and where you lived.  If you were living in Cheyenne  or Denver, for example, it might not have been that much of a change, although there definitely was one, than you would have noticed in Crab Apple Cove, Maine. 

Well, having defined dating, a bit, what is courting?  According to Ancestry.com, and we'll repeat the definition, its as follows:

A gentleman would court a young lady by asking her or her parents for permission to call on the family. The potential couple would have a formal visit — with at least one parent chaperone present — and the man would leave a calling card. If the parents and young lady were impressed, he’d be invited back again and that would be the start of their romance.

That's probably a fairly accurate, general, definition of courting.

It's also not really the idea that people have now when they hear the word. No, they tend to think of something like out of the Duggar's television show.  That sort of relationship is defined by something like this:

Courtship is a relationship between a man and a woman in which they seek to determine if it is God’s will for them to marry each other. Under the protection, guidance, and blessing of parents or mentors, the couple concentrates on developing a deep friendship that could lead to marriage, as they discern their readiness for marriage and God’s timing for their marriage. (See Proverbs 3:5–7.)

That definition comes from a Fundamentalist Christian website which likely has a Duggar like view of courting.  The emphasis in the text is from the original.  Is that courting? Well, maybe of a type, but its relationship with traditional courting might be relatively strained.  Indeed, to take the Duggar example, that sort of "courting", which many people have in mind when they hear the word, is actually somewhat closer to being an Arranged Marriage.  When people hear of "arranged marriages" they tend to think of something that happens in India today, or that they imagine to have been common in distinct social groups of the pat, but that's actually quite a bit closer to what we see described above.  That's evidenced by the fact that its not that uncommon to find examples of brides in particular refusing arranged marriages.  That is, in that "courtship" phase they made up their minds that Billy Bob, or whomever, was a dud and they rejected the counsel of their parents and prospective in-laws, often to upset their feelings, but nonetheless.  Anyhow, we shouldn't really assume that the Duggar's or those of like mind are "courting" but rather what they're really doing is testing the waters, barely, on an arranged marriage.

Match, one of those on line dating, or whatever, sites defines it, on the other hand, defines courting like this:

"Courtship" is a rather outdated word used to describe the activities that occur when a couple is past the dating stage and in a more serious stage of their relationship. It happens before the couple becomes engaged or married and is usually meant to describe when a man is attempting to woo a woman, with marriage as the end goal. Dating has a more informal connotation and implies that the couple is not necessarily exclusive.

That's likely more accurate, quite frankly, than the one with the bold text cited just above but it isn't exactly accurate in a historical sense either.  Rather, what that describes is a stage of dating that often had no defined term that applied to it, and still tends not to have one.  In high school terminology that term used to be "going steady" and that seems to have crept down from the use of the term in the 30s and 40s by people in their 20s and 30s, but by and large it tends to have no real term and courting isn't really it.

Not that this matters. What we're seeking to do is to look at the practice that preceded dating.  If we've diverted a bit in regards to the definition of "courting" its to try to disrupt the preconceived notions of what that is. So, if you have in mind something like one of the many Duggar's and whatever they are doing, push it out of your mind.  If you have in mind something like what Match is stating, push that out too.

So what was it.

Well, Ancestry.com basically defines it, but as we've already noted from our discussion above, that couldn't have been as widely applicable in society pre 1920, or at least as strictly defined, as people might believe. And we have to look at by culture and economic status.

The question when we do a thing like this is how far back to we actually go?  A person can keep going back and back until their analysis becomes completely useless.  If we go back, for example, to tribal societies we're not going to be really learning anything as their conditions of life are different and, of course, we're outside of the era that we're trying to focus on even though we would, quite frankly, learn some things.

 Tinglit couple.

So we'll start with the Medieval era.

Already, no doubt, people are rolling their eyes thinking that nothing that far back can be relevant.  Well, we just saw a post, we should keep in mind, in which erudite pundit George F. Will stated that in the mid 19th Century Americans lived in a world "more Medieval than modern", and while I disputed that and still do, there's something to that.

People were, of course, getting married and giving in marriage in the Medieval era and, in spite of what some now imagine, all the common problems and vices that exist in the current world existed then as well, and certainly did in regards to human interactions.  When we think of marriages in the Medieval Era we most often think of the marriages of monarchs which are, quite frankly, a really hideous example.  Most people were not monarchs.  Marriages of royalty had a power broking quality to them as long as monarchs amounted to a hill  of beans and, quite frankly, they're still rather strange in some ways.  So we shouldn't look to them except to note that they were often arranged for political reasons.

For common people, however, none of this is true.  They chose their own spouses and men and women had the freedom to find and contract a marriage.  That's actually much like today, other than that their world was very immediate.  Is that courting?

It probably is, given the context of the world in which they lived.

In that world most people knew everyone they were ever going to know from birth on.  People moved very little, as a rule, and classes that did move, were suspect.  Given that, for most people, their spouse was somebody that they knew very early on and therefore they knew their characters very early on.  When they were "of an age to marry" something like courting occurred, but in a highly natural and informal way.   You don't really need to be introduced to the parents of your future spouse if you've known them for two decades, in other words.

Now, no doubt, some formal interaction between families occurred in this context, but probably much less than people typically imagine.  Indeed, contracting a marriage itself was blisteringly informal, contrary to what people now imagine.  At least up until the 1050s all of Europe was Catholic which gives people the concept that all marriages were formalized in a Mass like Catholic weddings today but in fact that's not true and indeed it doesn't reflect the Catholic, or Orthodox, concept of marriage today.  Marriages are actually preformed by the couple themselves and that's exactly how they were in the Early Medieval period.  A couple that decided to marry simply determined that they would and exchanged their promise to be spouses.  "Church marriages", as we now have them, came about slightly later for most people (they were a feature of the marriages of nobles already, but for another reason) which was in large part because the Church was seeking to protect the rights of women.  It was too easy for men to disavow a hastily contract marriage free of any obligation which was bad for obvious reasons so the  Church, as a matter of Canon law, started requiring all marriages to be in Church in order that both the solemn nature of the obligation was obvious and so that their were witnesses.  Piers Plowman, in other words, couldn't disavow his marriage to Edyth Weaver by simply saying "nope, didn't happen".

Going forward, the conditions described above were the conditions for the great mass of people up until at least t he industrial revolution.  In the later phases of this, as we enter the Renaissance and on into the  Age of Enlightenment, we did get a courtly class, or rather one of minor nobility, that while not rich was rich in comparison to most people and that is where we get much of our current romantic nature of courtship for those who have that image in mind when they think of "courting".

If you are so inclined you can find about a million Georgian era paintings of courtship in this context.  Think of every courtship described by Jane Austen and you are there.  The romance between all the male and female characters in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility defines this type of courtship and the descriptions, while highly romantic, are fairly accurate.  Fairly accurate, of course, for that class.

Indeed, while providing an historical record of courtship was not their intent, the two fairly recent movies made out of those Jane Austen films provide, as do the books themselves, a nice depiction of courting behavior amongst the English landed class, and indeed amongst the European landed class (it occurs to me that I need to add those films to our Movies In History series).  I'm cautious about mentioning movies in the context of historical analysis, but in some instances they portray it very well and the books noted and the films based on it do a nice job of this.  I suspect the book Emma does as well, although I haven't read it, but the film based on it and set in contemporary Los Angeles, Clueless, has an odd courtly feel to it in spite of its setting, which might say something about the nature of courting and dating that we will get to later.  Another book that excellently portrays the same thing, in the same class, but in a different setting, is War and Peace, although in my view War and Peace has never been successfully made into a decent film.

Anyhow, if you want to get the classic romantic portray of courting these texts give really good examples of it.  Generally, the young female characters identify suitors and hope to secure their attention in a public venue of some sort, and then its up to the suitor to make his introduction in some fashion, usually in a relatively formal way.  Pride and Prejudice provides good examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts of this type. The activities that are depicted tend towards gatherings and sometimes outdoor venues and activities of some sort.

In all these texts you can get hints that things didn't quite work the same way for lower classes, but only hints.  For the most part, as they lived in a smaller world, their conduct in these regards remained much as it had always been except, perhaps, in urban areas where underclass communities were obtaining a reputation for lawlessness and immorality which, while exaggerated, wasn't wholly undeserved.  In any event, if Jane Austen's novels remain popular it isn't because they describe something fully alien to us, although they certainly do in part, but rather because the opposite is true.

Young couple, at the races. 1910.

Across the Atlantic, where there were fewer people to engage in courtly behavior and where there was a large class of yeomanry well into the 19th, and even 20th, Century we could skip much of what's depicted in these novels and just get to the rule, which was that bay and large people tended, outside the Frontier, to meet somebody in a very local circumstance and much of what was described in the introductory Ancestry.com paragraph was correct, although it would have been much less alien than described.  For people, for example, growing up in a farming community in the Midwest chances are high that they all attended the same community events and attended the same churches, so they met each other routinely well before they were "courting".  Courting probably actually reflected, in that context, that they were moving on to the "steady" aspect of what was described for dating, and that's why the families took it seriously and began to interact with each other differently.

 Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.  Probably none of these people met by "dating", and maybe not by "courting".  Off topic, note nice example of newsboy cap on man in center.

This is also why some period literature strikes us as more odd than Austen's novels.  If we read, for example Giants In The Earth's sequel Peder Victorious we are presented with the shocking proposition that young Peder marries an Irish girl from the farming community.  Now this wouldn't seem that weird, but if we take into account that communities were very tight knit religiously and ethnically, it would have been.

We have to modify all of this to take into account ethnicities, in fact, which impact all of this, as well as geography.  Some ethnicities had very distinct courting customs that persevered in North America at least for awhile, while others died out but still left a bit of an impact.  In Ireland, for example, a custom existed requiring the introduction of a male suitor to the family by way of a Babhdóir, who acted both as a matchmaker and as a chaperon in the early stages of the relationship.  This process involved such things as rides in "dog carts" and the like and if it progressed, when it became serious, involved the woman's family touring the home of the male suitor, to see if it was suitable for their daughter if they married.  This sort of process is depicted in the film The Quiet Man, although at a point at which it had no doubt largely waned (a better depiction of 20th Century customs is given in the novel and the film Durango).  The Irish do not seem to have imported the custom to the United States, but well into the mid 20th Century the majority of Irish immigrants and Irish Americans met their spouses at church or in Catholic schools.  My parents, I'd note, met just that way (church) and I'm fairly certain that my father's parents (she was an Irish American, he was a German American) met that way also.  At least one of my cousin's met her spouse that way as well, so this does keep on keeping on.

A remotely similar custom existed in Jewish communities in some, but not all, regions of Europe and in the United States in that initial meetings between couples were made by a Shadchan, a matchmaker. There's a common idea that all such individuals were professionals but that's erroneous.  The role was simply that played by a person making the introduction.  Unlike other matchmaking traditions, this one actually lives on in Orthodox Jewish communities due the strict criteria that exist for the entire courting process in those communities, that process serving a singular purpose.

A really good depiction of southern European courting is given to us by the move The Godfather in which the highly formalized tradition in Italy is depicted.  That tradition did somewhat carry on in the form of a big meeting of the parents event, although that's common to courting and even dating in general.  The recently film Brooklyn depicts such an event, in the context of dating.
 
All that's well and good, as noted, but once we get out of rural areas it broke down.  Marriages certainly took place but the meetings were obviously much less formal and look a lot more like dating, quite often.  And hence, the problem, as we will see, in actually distinguishing if this tradition is real or simply something similar to a larger process.

Anyhow, in the rural West a lot of unattached young men simply met young women, somewhere.  Typically, for men part of a cultural community such as a religion or ethnicity, they met them there. The idea that all young men were cowboys who met barmaids or soiled doves is erroneous.  Of course, meetings weren't limited to churches, but men grossly outnumbered women and the presence of an unattached young woman drew attention fairly readily.  Invitations to dances,and the like, drew suitors, but suitors whose families were often quite remote.  As homesteading advanced, ranching families tended to know each other but it wouldn't be correct that the courting that subsequently developed was of the really formal type discussed above.  Some of it would resemble that, but not much.

Women were so small in numbers in some communities that crossing big cultural boundaries was quite common.  It's well known that Frontiersmen routinely married Indians and quite often those marriages were successful in spite of a huge cultural gap between the spouses. This continued on into the 20th Century and its not uncommon to find men with rural occupations marrying into nearby Indian Tribes or, further south, into preexisting Hispanic communities.  Like the French, Hispanic communities were broad in their views towards other cultures and did not object to intermarriage at all, as long as the Catholic religious views of the Catholic spouse were respected.

As the Frontier populated with men, some men became sufficiently lonely that they simply skipped courting entirely, which of course required a like minded women to do the same.  This resulted in the "mail order bride" and something that might be called speed courting, which again was surprisingly common.  A newstory from 1916 gives us an example of this:

Chicago Girls Want Husbands

CHICAGO:  So many Chicago girls want to go back to North Dakota as wives of bachelor farmers who were here on special train for the stock and horse show, that an official cupid committee  has been announced.  It is announced that a committee will take charge of all love letters and see that the right girl gets tho right man.

The author of that article seemed somewhat skeptical of the phenomenon, and I have to say that I am as well.  But it is true that unattached young women, and not always single immigrants as often depicted in film and in story, did sometimes arrange to travel by train to meet a fiance in the West that they knew not at all, thereby really taking their chances.

Well, what of all of this?

Starting off on all of this I noted that I didn't end up in this article where I thought I would. And the reason is that I'm not really convinced that things have changed as radically as people suppose here and that our grandparents therefore had some special skill that younger generations lack, although I think there is a little to it, as I'll note below.

The reason that my view changed in these regards is that I think that dating and courting, as we've defined them above, are actually just basically two sides to the same coin and not as different as we might suppose.

Dating, as we have noted, came in during the 1920s, or so we're told. But as we have also noted, ti seems fairly clear that something like dating existed in some places, for much of the same reasons it later would, quite a bit earlier.  If Joe Smith, cowhand who is filing for a small homestead, rides into town and asks Mable Jones outside of the Methodist Church on Sunday morning if she'd like to attend the ranch dance at the Goose Egg next Saturday, are they courting, or dating?  Smith's parents probably live in Arkansas, and Jones in Maine.  No family introductions will be occurring.  I think that's dating.

For that matter, if Otto Ungs asks Gertrude Meis if she would like to attend the St. Patrick's Day picnic that the Irish at Holy Ghost are putting on next Thursday in downtown Denver, are they dating or courting, even if Meis' parents like in Denver and will be there?  Hard to say, but it crosses some line a bit.

And I think what we've really seen, to a large degree, is that there's been some societal evolution that's confused us a bit on what we've seen.  We can see that in the history of dating, actually.

Much is made of the "went to college" aspect of dating vs. courting. And there's something to that.  But unless we are prepared to accept the idea that the relatively few people who attended college in the 20s and 30s had a massive influence on the behavior of the many who did not, younger than them, we have a bit of a problem here. And I've already suggested that the spread of "dating" was due to wider reasons than the increase of the college aged population after World War One.

 Cinema exploiting the exotic nature of college, to most Americans, and single couples in a movie being made at Columbia University in 1927.  Films inform our concept of things and movies like this probably continue to influence our concept of this story today.

Well I doubt that.

And if we look at dating over time, I think the doubt is born out.

We've already explored the somewhat fluid nature of society and of this entire process above. But what I didn't emphasize there is that society itself was generally more balkanized, if you will, than it now is.  Indeed, it was by quite some measure.

Let's start with the college example, to which so many people routinely cite.  Yes, young people did attend alone, as noted, but who attended?  Well, mostly white Protestants attended.

Indeed, depending upon the school, being a Protestant and of means was practically necessary.  So, if a person was going to Princeton or Yale, they were Protestants and of sufficient means to attend.  Most of the Ivy League schools, in fact, had chapel requirements until well after World War Two.  So, for those dating young people at these schools, they were dating very much within their classes.  It wouldn't be very likely for much wide mixing to occur in this context and if it did, it was likely to be withing Protestant confessions.  Not that this couldn't be a problem, it could be, but it wasn't likely at all, for example, for Jewish or Catholic college students to be anywhere in this mix.

This gets more blurred, however, when you start considering state colleges, which were already well up and running.  They had wider diversity than the Ivy League, but there were still wide demographics that did not attend them.  So, for them, you might get a sort of wider mixing portrayed well (but still somewhat out of the context we're describing) by the movie A River Runs Through It, in which we see a young college educated Presbyterian man meet a young woman, who has dropped out of college, who is a Methodist, back in their Montana home town.

 Sharecroppers dance, 1939, Oklahoma.

Otherwise the demographic factors already discussed were in operation.  People met their spouses within the group of which they were part, which is still the case today, but the groups are larger.  Many people met at church.  People certainly met at school, but schools were generally local.  In areas with distinct ethnicities the schools reflected that.  In areas where there were sufficient numbers of Catholics there were Catholic schools (and still are) and Catholic students met each other there.  In large enough cities this was sufficiently the case that such schools might even reflect distinct ethnicities.  Denver had, and still has,  Polish Catholic school, where students learn Polish.  Salt Lake City has an excellent Greek Orthodox school.  There are Jewish schools in some areas, and even where there are not where there are large Jewish communities Jewish children will often attend "Hebrew School" to learn aspects of their faith.  Mormon students even today attend an institution which Mormons refer to as "seminary" although its distinctly different than what that means in the typical context.

Continuing out, even public schools reflected this.  Prior to really good school transportation all the students in a rural school were from the immediate area.  Black students were, in areas with large black populations, subject to segregation.  And so on.

And, in many ares of the country, communities themselves were very much made up of people who were like each other.  This is still true, of course, but was more so at the time.  Taking another movie example, albeit one that was depicting its own era, the film Marty does a good job of depicting dating at the time it was filmed in the 1950s.  Notable in it is that it depicts a romance and conditions all amongst people who are of the same basic class, background and religion.  Another, more recent and fairly accurate depiction is given by the film Brooklyn.

 Dancing young couple, San Angelo Fat Stock Show, San Angelo Texas, 1940s.

If this doesn't quite reflect dating today, that's because society has become more fluid and societal lines with it.  Busing and the end of segregation has ended some of the sharp ethnic lines that once existed.  Affirmative action programs, which followed in the wake of the huge expansion of the college population following World War Two, have changed the mix in college.  The concept that careers are the end all and be all of existence has caused college graduates to often delay their marriages which means that many now find spouses in their professional lives.  The end of the Protestant nature of universities, and for that matter the end of the Catholic nature of Catholic universities, has meant that the former divisions that existed in private higher education are largely gone.  So, in essence, there is a wider pool

Also, and it can't be denied, the destruction of standards brought about by the 1960s and the unrestrained adoption of views hostile by nature by the political left and its adherents has brought about a lot of confusion in the entire are of male female relationships and relationships in general, and that's done damage to dating and marriage in general.  Not that its destroyed them, but it's definitely done damage.

Which,  suppose, brings me to my concluding point.  Its easy to take a romanticized view of the past, but it's also easy to dismiss claims that the past, in some ways, was better, at some things, than the present. And here we have to give pause.  Nobody but a hopeless romantic would suggest that the world should adopt something like what we see in portrays of Georgian courting as a standard, and for most people, that was never the standard anyway.  And frankly the "courting" rituals depicted in the Duggar's, or rather the arranged marriages we see there, are frightening.  But something has been lost by the destruction of standards brought about in the wake of the 60s and 70s, but which only came into full fruition in this century.  Part of that is simply based on the emphasis on the wrong, and indeed, quite trivial influences we now see, both societal, career and economic.  Taking something out of the past, while maybe not possible, should at least be done by influence.  The close nature of prior behavior within closer communities produced, it would seem, fairly good results based on things that were more solid than career and checkbook.

Rural African American couple in the 1920s.

England's Ireland troubles shakes up the Irish Canadian Rangers: Henry Judah "Flip" Trihey resigns as commander of the Irish Canadian Rangers

On this day in 1917, Col. Henry Judah "Flip" Trihey resigned as commanding officer of the Irish Canadian Rangers, the 199th Canadian Expeditionary Force, in protest of rumored British plans to break the unit up and use its mean as reinforcements rather than commit them to action under his command as a single unit and in frustration with the general situation involving the Irish in the British Empire in general.  

 

 This recruiting poster had an image on it that was almost certainly Trihey's who was well known from his hockey days.

The resignation wasn't a mere "I quit". Trihey accused the Canadian government of deception in his resignation on the basis that he understood the 199th was to be deployed as a unit, not piecemeal.  Indeed the Irish Canadian patriot had seen his unit shipped overseas under the Latin motto Quis Separabit?, who can separate us, in an appeal to drawing Catholic and Protestant Irish to the unit, although most of Quebec's Irish were Catholic.

While it would seem fairly obvious now, somehow some of the Ranger's recruiting platforms also began to apparently have a sour taste in Trihey's mouth when the unit arrived in Ireland.  As noted in the earlier post on this unit, it was sent there to flesh out it ranks as it was not able to draw sufficient numbers of Canadians prior to going overseas.  The unit had adopted as a recruiting platform the motto "Small nations must be free" and the irony of that impacted Trihey upon his arrival in Ireland which, of course, was still in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rebellion.  While Ireland itself had contributed thousands of soldiers to the British Army, recruiting on the basis of small nation independence was obviously rather off the mark.

A Rangers recruiting poster that probably would have made more sense for the Irish Republican Army than the Irish Canadian Rangers.

While he was reacting to rumors, rather than fact, in part, the impact of them must have been severe as the unit had only barely arrived in Ireland.  The result was, however, that he went home by his own choice.  Mere weeks after having arrived in Ireland.

 Trihey as a hockey star, before his days a mustachioed colonel and lawyer.

His hasty departure was noted and not appreciated.  The unit was not immediately disbanded or absorbed into any others but instead was sent around Ireland in a recruiting drive with the hope of fleshing out hte Irish Canadian ranks with Irishmen from Ireland.  At one point this had achieved sufficient success that it was felt that the unit could be assigned to the Canadian 5th Division which started being formed in February 1917 in Britain.  When that occurred Canadian Minister of Justice Charles Doherty appealed for Trihey's reinstatement, but Canadian High Commissioner George Perley rejected the proposal and in fact termed Trihey's departure a “desertion” and condemned Trihey for his departure on the basis that he “left without consulting or saying goodbye to his officers.”  Doherty continued to campaign for Trihey but by that time Trihey was calling for Irish independence from the United Kingdom and he went on to oppose conscription in Quebec.  His experiences had clearly converted him from an Irish Canadian Empire patriot to a Canadian opponent of English rule in Ireland,if not the Empire itself, which would have probably reflected the views of the common Irish in Canada and the United States, the exception being that he was a public figure and now very vocal. Suffice it to say he was not restored to command, and indeed, in the context of the era, he wouldn't have been a suitable commander at that point, and may well not have been from the very first instance.

He wasn't the only one to resign, at the time he did, it should be noted.  Major W. P. O’Brien, his second in command, likewise did.

The unit itself would not actually be absorbed into another until May.  His position was assumed by Col. James Vincent Patrick O’Donahoe who would die in action, in command of a different unit, that following May.  The Canadian 5th Division suffered a similar fate and even though it was formed, it was not deployed as a unit, and its constituents were used as replacements for other units.

Trihey had been instrumental in raising the regiment for which he had taken leave from his law practice.  Prior to that he had been a legendary hockey player and he was inducted in the Hockey Hall of Fame posthumously.  Following his resignation from the service he returned to practicing law in Montreal.  He died in 1942 at age 64.  He's an interesting example of conflicting Irish views within Canada, all within a single individual.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Note:  Some of the above is based upon the excellent entry here, at:

Patriots, Crooks and Safety-Firsters

Colonels of the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Very interesting website!

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Jeffrey City, Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Baptist Church, Jeffrey City, Wyoming:    

 

 

 The First Baptist Church in Jeffrey City, Wyoming.  Other than its location, I don't know anything about it.

Poster Saturday: For Every Fighter a Woman Worker

The Energy Sector Stabilizing?

After I all but wrote off coal earlier in the week, the Tribune is reporting this week that coal has rebounded to where it's at about 75% of its pre bust production in the state.

That's not a full recovery, to be sure, but its doing a lot better than it was.

One of the people interviewed speculated that the market had been overheated and that this is a return to a more normal level of activity.  My guess is that's close to right.  This is likely to be the new normal.  I don't think my long term view expressed earlier in the week is likely wrong, but its not like I said that coal was going to disappear overnight.  A 25% reduction in production probably doesn't seem like great news for coal miners, but it actually probably is, compared to what was occuring.

On other fronts, the petroleum industry locally is hiring again, so things must be picking up a bit there.  This may be a similar story. A recovery, but not a super heated one.  A more normal level, therefore, of activity.

The Best Post of the Week of January 1, 2017

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

 

Sunday Morning Scene: Casper's Downtown Century Old Churches

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

Dual losses for Carranza

Villa's forces raid Santa Rosalia (later Santa Rosalia of Carmargo, and now Carmargo City) and in the process execute 300 prisoners, including the Chinese residents of the town.

Meanwhile, further south, the forces of Emiliano Zapata retake Cuernavaca.

 Zapata and his lieutenants in Cuernavaca

Not a good day for the Constitutionalist.

New feature: Best Posts of the Week of dd/mm/yyyy

Eh?

Just this.

We're starting a new feature where we are going to go back and list the best posts of the prior week, assuming that there were any, on Saturday mornings. Some weeks there will be none, perhaps most weeks.

The reason for this is that over 2016 we dramatically increased the number of posts we were putting up . . . well we did about 300 more, due to the election in part, but more than that, due to tracking a lot of daily events of 1916.  This was part of our effort to track the Punitive Expedition in real time, and to get a sense of what like living in those times was like.

That's been fun, and apparently it's been a success as our monthly views have enormously climbed, but it also means that we are now risking some of the better posts we do, or at least the ones we think are particularly good, getting buried.  This feature will just reemphasize, on a weekly basis, the ones we think are really good.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but it points out the opinion of the author, anyhow.  We hope you enjoy, and of course, you are free, as always, to ignore.

On this new feature, which will be listed on Features menu on the right side of the blog, we would note that anyone hitting it now will note that there are already some links on this topic.  We've added a couple of posts and backdated them in the spirit of this feature, linking in some of our old favorites.

Getting a School Garden Blooming

From the USDA Blog:  Getting a School Garden Blooming

Odd to see this in the contest of a United States Department of Agriculture publication.  It wasn't all that long ago, or perhaps it was, when this was very much a Federal program.

 

From World War One.

Note also how our World War One vintage school gardener is dressed. . . tie and all.

Pierce County, Washington passes bond issue to purchase land for what would become Ft. Lewis

 Camp Lewis later in 1917.

Residents of Pierce County, Washington, passed a bond issue on this day in order to purchase 70,000 acres on the Nisqually Plains at American Lake with the intent to donate it to the United States for military purposes.

 Camp Lewis remount station in October, 1917.

The land would become Camp Lewis, and then Ft. Lewis, a still active military post.

Congress  had made the acceptance of land for military purposes authorized in August, 1916.

The Cheyenne State Leader for January 6, 1917: Misconceptions on Mexico

The Leader was the more reserved of the two Cheyenne papers, and yet on this day its headlines were large, and not accurate.

Villa was actually doing well in battles he was engaged in, in this time frame, and the US was about to get out of, not invade, Mexico.

Of course the article about the supposed invasion was reporting on camp rumors.  Based on personal experience, the rumors that circulate camp are pretty darned far from accurate.  When I was in basic training, for example, I heard a rumor that the United States had gone to war with Israel and another that Argentina had sunk a ship of the U.S. Navy in the Falklands War, which was going on at the time. 

Sears sells Craftsman

Sears, Roebuck & Co., the ailing retail one time giant founded in 1886 has sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley, Black & Decker for $900,000,000.

That's a lot of cash, but the sale of the Craftsman brand, which Sears has carried since 1927, can't be a good sign.

Sears has been owned by Kmart since 2005.  It hasn't been itself for a long time, in my view.  Here locally its downtown store was once one of the downtown anchors, along with J. C. Pennys, but both moved up to the mall when it was built.  It's been declining as a draw for a long time.  Craftsman tools were at one time legendary for their quality although I've never owned any myself. They may still be very good, in so far as I know.

Blog Mirror: MeridethinWyoming: Wyoming Winter Hints for the Woefully Under Informed

MeridethinWyoming:  Wyoming Winter Hints for the Woefully Under Informed

The Casper Daily News for January 5, 1917. Amuse your chickens.

This Casper paper doesn't have anything on the front page on the ending of the Joint Commission with Mexico, unlike the one Cheyenne paper did on this day (the other Cheyenne paper also did not).

I'm posing this one to show that, basically.  Some of the headlines are the same as those that ran in Cheyenne, some not.  Things like that, then as now, are up to the paper.

By focusing on stories that relate to the Punitive Expedition I'm likely giving a false impression that every paper, everywhere, was equally focused as the Cheyenne ones were.  Not so.  This Casper paper (one of two or three that were published in Casper at that time) did not focus on it nearly to the same extent, for whatever reason.  That's important to note.

Crime and scandal figured largely in this issue. The exploration of oil prospects near Powder River, which would cause a boom there, was going on in a major way.  And the odd item in the bottom left hand corner.  "Chickens should be amused, says expert."

The Cheyenne State Leader for January 5, 1917: Joint Commission to Disband

Something was clearly going on. . . the Joint Commission with Mexico was getting set to disband, but it was clear that Carranza's demand on the United States, leave, was going to be met.  It seemed that Wilson and Carranza had arrived at the same point. . . for different reasons.

As reported in Cheyenne's other paper a day ago, wildlife was on the increase in the state.  And a scandal back east figured large in the headlines.

Iva Shuster, Official Court Stenographer

Ms. Shuster, age 23, was appointed official stenographer for the City Magistrates' courts in New York City on January 5, 1917 and hence her photographs was taken here.

This role was principally occupied by men, not women, at the time and this would have truly been newsworthy. The role was not new to her, however, as she had occupied this position for the United States District Court in Arizona for two years prior.  She was self taught in her profession.

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

 
Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology, and probably in coal.

There is a lot of speculation about a revival in the future of coal around here.  I'm skeptical.  This doesn't mean that I come from the outside where coal is simply a freakish oddity.  No, I'm pretty familiar with coal. . . personally.  At one time, coal, I thought, would fuel my career. When other students in the UW geology department of the early 1980s were planning on becoming petroleum geologist, I focused on coal, which wasn't suffering. . . at first, the way oil then was.  Of course, it came to, and I went from the geology department into under employment so my plan failed.

The irony of that is that my choice on coal as a focus was intentional.  I could see the handwriting on the wall in regards to employment in the oil industry.  Others seemingly couldn't, or having entered onto that set of railroad tracks they just couldn't get off.  Coal, on the other hand, was doing fine in the early 1980s. . . at first.  There were coal mines operating at that time which aren't now.  Indeed, there was an underground coal mine in Hanna, a continuation of a situation that had existed well into the early 20th Century.

Well, that didn't work out the way I'd panned and by 1985, when I approached graduation from the University of Wyoming, after five years of effort (five was typical for geologist, that was five full semesters) I graduated into being an . . . .artilleryman.

Yup.  Artillery. The rescuer of my economic fortunes.

I'd joined the National Guard right out of high school and was still in it in 1985 when I graduated.  The Guard basically employed me on a semi full time basis for a year while I tired to find a job.  I couldn't, of course, so I ended up going back to school to obtain a JD.  Indeed, relating back to the Guard, I've felt guilty ever since as I let my enlistment expire in 1986 just before I went back to law school as I believed all the propaganda I'd heard about how hard law school is.  Hah!  It's nothing compared to obtaining a bachelors in geology. 

  

My main employer, right after receiving my bachelor's degree.

Anyhow, in that period of time between my general geology studies at Casper College (during which I really picked up a love of geomorphogy) and my graduation, the first time, at the University of Wyoming by which time I'd picked up a focus on coal, I learned a lot about coal.  At the same time I nearly obtained enough credits for a BA in history, which perhaps reflects a natural interest that reflects itself back here.

 So, perhaps in some ways, I'm uniquely suited to ponder the long decline of coal.   Or at least I have.

And indeed the path of coal, and its long slow decline, is highly relevant to where we find ourselves now.  Lots of people in the coal states believe that the election of Donald Trump is going to revive the fortunes of coal.  Here in Wyoming quite a few people are so acclimated to coal paying the bills that they can't imagine anything else.  Indeed, just this past weekend I was at a public event, wearing my shabby (truly) Carhartt coat and my Stormy Kromer cap, probably looking like a guy who had shoveled a lot of coal (and indeed I have shoveled a little) and was accosted by a person sitting under a banner proclaiming something about a "return" to liberty and the Constitution who started off on a speech about would I like to sign a petition in opposition to any kind of new taxes.  No, I won't sign that as I just don't see coal being able to pay the Wyoming freight in the future anymore.  Maybe some other mineral or minerals can, but coal isn't going to be able to the way it once did (and besides, I'd be unlikely to sign anyway as I tend to find that people are always opposed to new taxes but not bothered by demanding that the things taxes pay for are really good).

I think the path of coal, being familiar with it, might be best illustrated by a few rough dates and illustrations.  Its something that should be considered.

So let's start around 1900.  That was a world fueled by coal (and by wood).  Sure, kerosene was around, and it had replaced whale oil to a large extent.  I have around here a draft post, now months and months old, building on a George F. Will column that noted:

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to 10 times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age 12.

As I will note, I don't dispute the details that Will recites here, but I do doubt the "more medieval than modern assertion in a major way.  Indeed, some of these things argue, I think, the other way around and I think that misstates the nature of the Medieval world.

But noting what Will states about lights, we note what he said, and further note that it was accurate.

• "No household was wired for electricity"

This is quite true.

• "Flickering light came from candles and whale oil,"

Whale oil chandelier, photo from the Library of Congress.  Up until the Will entry, I'd never even considered there being such a thing as a whale oil chandelier.

And so, in many places it did.  But coal fueled a lot of other things.

But let's consider coal in 1900.

It fueled the ships.

 USS Ohio, approximately 1898, as the USS Maine, which sank in a coal explosion in 1898, is in the background.

It fueled the trains, the only significant interstate transportation that existed.

New Your central yard, about 1907.

It heated the homes, where wood did not.

And it fueled industry, particularly the steel industry.

Blat furnace, about 1905.

And then things began to change.

It really started with navies in some ways, although some might argue that it started with hydroelectric.  We'll start with navies.

Navies had been powered by sail up until the mid 19th Century but already by the time of the American Civil War that was changing.  The U.S. Navy may have had its grandest ships under sail during that war, but coal fired wheels were being introduced even then.   And the scary smoke belching squat "monitors"  that signaled the end of the age of sail were coal (and perhaps wood) burning beasts.  Slow, hardly seaworthy, but iron clad.  It was pretty clear by 1865 that the age of militarized wind was ending.

And indeed the Naval reformation that occurred after the American Civil War is incredibly stunning.  Everything about navies soon changed.  By the 1890s every major navy in the world was building ships that look odd to our eyes, but which still look familiar .  Big guns on big ships powered by coal replaced sailing vessels, and the general purpose yeoman sailor was replaced by the specialist.  At about this time, in fact, the U.S. Navy started to switching from a navy drawing its recruits mostly from port towns, and which was in fact an integrated navy, to one which was segregated which drew its recruits from the interior of the country.  A wood and sail navy required men who had grown up near, or even on ships, and who knew the ins and outs of sail. That was a multi ethnic, polyglot group of men who in some way resembled the men in every port town around the world more than they did the men in the interior of their own countries.  It's  no accident that the first Congressional Medal of Honor to go to a foreign born serviceman went to a sailor, in action during the American Civil War fighting a naval battle in. . . . .Japan.

The naval battle in Shimonoseki Straits where an English sailor serving on board the USS Wyoming won a Congressional Medal of Honor.  Note that these ships already featured coal fire steam, in addition to sail.

While there was a sail and steam age, i.e., an age that combined both, for navies it wouldn't last long. For commercial shipping it lasted longer, and indeed the age of sail itself lingered on until after World War Two, amazingly enough, in some usages.  But for big ships, coal fired boilers were the norm before the turn of the century.  Sail lingered, but only lingered.

And so we entered the coal fired world. The degree to which coal fired everything, almost, is stunning.  If we take the world of 1900 heavy long distance transportation of all types was coal fired.  Trains and ships, that is.  Local transportation was seeing the beginnings of the Petroleum Age, but only the beginnings.  Locally, it was very much a horse oriented world, and indeed the railroads themselves caused a massive boom in heavy hauler horses around the turn of the prior century which gave us the really big draft horses, rather than farms as we so often imagine.  Something had to hault hat weight from the railhead to the warehouse.

And heat was going the way of coal. Coal fired, well fires, heated homes all around the country everywhere.  Boilers for apartment buildings, furnaces in homes.  Wood remained, but it was coal that was the oncoming fuel.

A World War One vintage poster of the United States Fuel Administration.  This period poster nicely illustrates how coal fit in.  Homeowners were being urged to buy coal early in the year.  That coal wasn't delivered, in this poster, by a truck, but rather by a dump wagon drawn by heavy draft horses.  Given the light dress of the laborer and the depiction of foliage the poster must have been released during the summer.

It is, in short, impossible to overestimate the importance of coal around 1900.  It was called King Coal for a reason.

But things were beginning to slowly change.

For one thing, petroleum was creeping in.  Not in a massive way, but in a way that was clearly predictable.  George Will spoke of whale oil lamps, but by the second half of the 20th Century kerosene lanterns were very common and their advantages very obvious.  Following in their wake came gas lanterns and by necessity, piping for natural gas.  It wasn't long after that in which the first gas stoves were introduced. Already by the early 20th Century, therefore, there was gas lighting and gas stoves.  

And gasoline was already making its appearance in the internal combustion engine by 1900.

Very early internal combustion engine.

We've dealt with automobiles elsewhere, but we've become so acclimated to them that we rarely think of their history.  Automobiles were a 19th Century invention, albeit a very late 19th Century invention, not a 20th Century one.  That doesn't mean that they replaced the horse right away, that would hardly be true, but they do go back aways.  And they were not, and we should not pretend, that they were any sort of a threat to coal at first.  Not at all.  Cars, trucks and motorcycles were competition for the horse, not the train and certainly not the ship or even the barge.

Truck waiting in line with big long line of coal wagons, some time prior to World War One.

Which takes us back to ships.

And, more specifically, the Royal Navy.

For decades, indeed centuries, the world's biggest and best navy was the Royal Navy.  This does not mean, however, that there was ever a day in which some other navy wasn't contending with the Royal Navy for that position.  And given that, the British basically engaged in a naval arms race that lasted well over a century.  And that mean that it needed to always be on the alert for a technological advantage.

And coal had given one.  Steam meant that large steel ships were able to be constructed, fired by coal fueled boilers.  They had two significant disadvantages however.

Smoke and spontaneous ignition.

Let's talk about smoke first, the disadvantage that was always there.

Their smoke was visible all the way over the edge of the horizon.

This is something that people who are more familiar with ships of the World War Two era don't instantly recall about earlier steel ships, but coal fires smoke and hence coal fired boilers likewise smoke, or rather the coal fires smoke

 The Great White Fleet, and great clouds of black smoke, December 16, 1907.

Prior to the advent of air reconnaissance and radar the spotting of enemy fleets, or for that matter friendly forces, was done by the naked eye.  And it was a matter of absolutely vital concern.  In the vastness of the ocean ships at sea had always scoured the horizon for signs of enemy ships, and even clues that seem slight to landlubbers were picked up by trained sailors.  Sailors looked, in prior eras, for sails and masts on the horizon, with the assistance of spyglasses.  By the time of dreadnoughts, however, they were looking for the faintest hints of smoke, and coal fired boilers provided plenty of it.  Teams of sailors searched the horizon with massive binoculars looking for that wisp of smoke, which was often more than a wisp.

The next danger was rarer, but not so rare as to not be a serious problem.  Spontaneous combustion.

Coal has a well known propensity to self heat and to make it worse, the better the coal grade the bigger the problem.  Exposed to air and moisture coal begins to engage in an exothermic reaction and can relatively easily self heat to the point where it ignites.  Moreover, as it self heats and heads towards ignition it drives off highly flammable hydrocarbon gases. Indeed, heating coal intentionally in a controlled environment is a means of producing those gases and has sometimes been thought of as a method of producing them, although its never proven to be an efficient means of doing so.

Coal is so prone to spontaneous combustion that coal self ignition is a natural phenomenon.  It simply happens where coal gets exposed to sufficient oxygen and moisture. Anyone who has ever spent any time in an open pit coal mine has seen coal simply burning on its own, as I have.

There are ways to combat this, of course, but the problem is uniquely acute for ships.  Ships must store coal in large bunkers and must taken on a lot of coal at certain points.  Ships are wet by their very nature. So any coal burning ship has, at some point, a lot of coal with just enough oxygen and moisture to create a problem.

This proved to be a real problem for ships and of course there were extreme catastrophic occurrences, the most famous of which is the explosion of the USS Maine.  The Maine is an extreme example of what could occur, but any coal burning ship could experience what the Maine did.  Basically, in the case of the USS Maine, the coal self ignited and the coal bunkers had sufficient liberated gas to create a massive explosion.  Not quite as dangerous, but still a huge problem, a simple self ignition of the coal without an explosion was a disaster, quite obviously, of the first rate requiring sailors to put the coal fire out under extreme danger.

Coal's detriments on ships would have had to be accepted, and indeed they were, but for the existence of alternatives.  Indeed, coal survived as a naval fuel for an appreciably longer time than a person might actually suppose, so impressive were its advantages in general.  Measures were taken in ship design to try to combat the dangers, such as having the coal bunkers placed near outside ship's hulls such that the coolness of the water would translate to them, and placing sailors bunks along the bunker's walls so that the sailors could tell if heat was building, but the dangers were real and known. Also known was that there was an alternative, oil.

By the turn of the century naval designers were aware that oil could be used to heat boilers just as coal could, and they began to study it in earnest.  Indeed, not only could it be used, but it had numerous advantages.

Unlike coal, petroleum oil for ships fuel did not result in much smoke.  It resulted in some, but not anything like that which coal put out.  The smoke from a single ship was much less visible and suffice it to say the smoke from a fleet of ships was greatly reduced.  Again, there was smoke, but not smoke like that put out by coal fired boilers.  Indeed, it was so much reduced that to a large degree detection of ships over the horizon by the naked eye was approaching becoming a think of the past.

And petroleum does not spontaneously self ignite.  A big vat of petroleum can sit around forever and never touch itself off.  This does not mean, of course, that its free from danger.  It isn't.  But some of the dangers it poses were already posed by coal, but in lesser degrees.  Petroleum burns more freely than coal by quite some measure and once it ignites putting it out is extremely difficult.  Sparks, other fires, etc., all pose increased dangers for petroleum over bunkered coal, but they existed to some degree for bunkered coal already.

And petroleum is more efficient and easier to use for ships.  Coal was basically stoked by hand, a dirty laborious job.  But petroleum wasn't.  Petroleum burning boilers were fueled by what amounts to a plumbing system involving a greater level of technical know how but less physical labor.  And oil had double the thermal content of coal making it a far more efficient fuel which required less refueling.  And on refueling, ships fueled with oil can be refueled at sea.  Ships fueled with coal cannot be.  Indeed, the maintenance of coaling stations in the remote parts of the globe was a critical factor in naval planning prior to the introduction of oil.

Which isn't to say that there weren't some unique problems associated with petroleum for ship.

For one thing, the fact that it spreads out when leaked and can more easily ignite meant that petroleum added a unique and added horror for a stricken ship.  Coal fired ships that were simply damaged and sinking were unlikely to cause a horrific sea top fire.  Petroleum ships are very likely to do that.  And the risk of a munitions caused explosion is increased with petroleum fueled ships.  A torpedo into a coal bunker might blow a coal fired ship to bits with an explosion or might just sink it.  With a petroleum fueled ship the risk of an explosion in such a situation is increased as is the risk that oil on the water will catch on fire or otherwise kill survivors.

A huge factor, however, was supply.

By odd coincidence all of the major naval powers, save for Japan, had more than adequate domestic supplies of coal.  Some had very good supplies of coal, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Imperial Germany, within their own borders.  Japan nearly did in that it obtained it from territories it controlled on the Asian mainland, although that did make its supply more tenuous. At any rate all of the big naval powers of the pre World War One world had coal supplies that htey controlled.  That's a big war fighting consideration.  Of the naval powers of that era, in contrast, only the United States and Imperial Russia had proven petroleum sources they controlled, and Imperial Russia had proven it self to be a second rate naval power during the Russo Japanese War.

Switching from coal to oil did not occur in the Royal Navy, or any navy, all at once. The decision was made somewhat haltingly and it was an expensive proposition to convert an entire navy to oil.  Britain started to convert prior to World War One but it didn't complete the process until after the war.  Still, its decision to start constructing capitol ships as oil burners in 1912 was a huge step for a nation that had the world's largest navy but which had no domestic oil production at all.  The United States followed suit almost immediately, with its first large ship to be converted to oil, the USS Cheyenne, undergoing that process in 1913.

 The USS Cheyenne in 1916 while it was a submarine tender.  The Cheyenne was the first oil burning ship in the U.S. Navy, following the lead that the British had started.

The USS Cheyenne was illustrative of something else that was going on, however, that being the increased presence of heavy internal combustion engines for various uses.  The USS Cheyenne had been built as a monitor, a type of proto battleship (and had been named the USS Wyoming originally) but after its conversion to oil it would become a submarine tender in a few short years.  Submarines of the era were light vessels and, like a lot of light naval fighting ships ,they were diesels.  Marine diesel engines were replacing boilers completely in lighter vessels and of course diesel fuel is a type of oil.

Diesels in that application show that industrial diesel engines had arrived.

By World War Two every navy in the world was an oil burning, not a coal burning, navy.  And it wasn't just navies.  Merchant ships had followed in the navies' wakes.  They were now oil burning too for the most part.  Coal at sea had died.

 Giant marine diesel engine circa 1920.

The demise of coal at sea did not equate, of course, with the universal demise of coal, and this is very important to keep in mind.  Entering into the period of history we've been discussing, roughly 1900 to 1920, coal may have lost its crown at sea, but it remained hugely important, arguably increasingly important, elsewhere.  It continued to be the fuel of heavy transportation, IE., for trains, it continued to heat homes and it fired an ever growing  number of power plants.  Indeed that last application can't be overstated as in this same period the Western world was electrifying.  So whatever position it may have lost on the waves it was likely more than making it up on land.

Still, the trend line had been set.

And it would next show itself with transportation.

At least according to one source written in 1912 coal fueled 9/10s of all locomotive engines at that time.  The other 1/10th would have been fired by wood or, yes,  oil.

This photograph will appear again in a series of photographs on the centennial of their having been first taken, in January 1917, but these teenagers are stealing coal from a rail yard.  They are probably taking it home for heating fuel or are selling it to Bostonian's who probably knew darned well these kids had taken it illegally from the yards.  For that matter, the railroad likely knew they were taking it too.  Even today, decades after the end of the use of coal for locomotives the paths of old railways can be found by the coal ash and coal that the trains dropped as they passed by.  I've walked the path of the old UP here and there down by Laramie doing that.

Wood, I should  note, may seem strange for a locomotive engine of that era, but it really shouldn't.  The goal of any fuel used in a locomotive engine is to produce steam and burning wood will produce steam.  Wood isn't an efficient fuel for that but it was a common one very early on.  Most locomotives were switched to coal after the Civil War, assuming that they were not burning it already, but where wood was locally plentiful and the engine had a local use, as for a small engine associated with a timbering operation, wood was kept in use.  

Indeed, as a total aside, during World War One some small German engines were made that burned trash.  Coal is a military fuel, Germany's (and Poland's) coal is very good, but as a military fuel conservation was the rule of the day.

At any rate, in 1912 less than 1/10th of all steam engines were burning oil, but what is telling there is that some were.  So here too a trend line had started.

In following years more and more steam engines became oil burning engines.  The reasons may not be entirely clear and are somewhat subtle, but some of them have been touched upon already above.  Oil is a more efficient fuel. Not so much so, however, that all locomotives were switched to it. The famous Union Pacific Big Boys, for example, were coal burning to the end.

Union Pacific Big Boy. These were coal burning their entire career.

What did the coal burning locomotive in, in the end, or more properly the steam engine in, was the diesel.

Diesel engine, 1985, outside of Laramie Wyoming.

Diesels Electric trains proved to be a better and more efficient option for train engines in the end. Contrary to what some may think these locomotives do not work like a diesel truck in that the engine does not power the drive wheels. Rather the diesels are big generators and the trains are essentially electric.   By the same token, in the proper settings, trains run from overhead electric lines.  Either way, this type of engine did in the steam engine.

Now then, looking at it, we see that coal went from the main fuel for ships and trains to a remnant fuel for both in a fifty year period. Hardly overnight, but clearly observable.  A person living in the era, if they cared to notice the trend, would have noticed.  Certainly, for example, if you lived in Rawlins Wyoming and looked out towards the Union Pacific Railroad yard over the course of an average life, if you'd lived in this period, you would have seen it gone from a busy smoky and sooty yard to one which had only the blue haze of diesel fuel above it.  And given that Rawlins is just seven miles from Sinclair, where a refinery is located, but also is surrounded by coal deposits and actually had its origin as a coaling location for the Union Pacific, the change would have been pretty obvious.  If you worked in the big underground mines in Hanna you might actually be slightly worried.

Which isn't to say that coal stopped being used.  Not hardly.  It was still heating homes all over, including in Wyoming, and it still was the fuel for power plants.

Let's turn to domestic coal use, as we haven't really touched on that much.

 

Lennox "Torrid Zone" coal furnace

Now, as we've seen above, coal was a basic heating fuel early in the 20th Century, having replaced wood in that role to a large extent.  During World War One Americans were urged to stock up on heating coal early, which meant filling their coal rooms full during the summer rather than waiting until winter.  Coal soot was such a prominent part of big city life that it came to be an accepted part, even contributing to the legendary concept that London was foggy.  It wasn't so much foggy as it was sooty.  This use of coal continued on for a very long time, and indeed here in Wyoming, which switched to gas early, people still ordered coal for heating fuel at least as late as the 1940s. 

 

Coal furnaces in the Library of Congress, 1900.  Shoot, and Washington D. C. isn't even all that cold.

But over time this changed to where heating oil, yes another use of petroleum oil and natural gas began to replace coal.  By the 1970s at least the price of heating oil became a major factor in annual fuel price concerns, but nobody really thought much of coal for the same purpose.  You can still buy a coal furnace today, if you are so inclined, but very few people do.  So yet another use of coal yielded to petroleum. And here, over time, petroleum has yielded to natural gas and electrical generation.

 Workman converting coal furnace to oil during World War Two.  Oil was more plentiful and efficient which sparked a government move to convert home heating to oil

Of course electrical generation also became a major use of coal in the early 20th Century, and it remains one today.  But, as has been seen from the trend line above, coal isn't the only option, and here too its a declining one.  While oil did make an appearance in the electrical generation field oil powered power plants are more or less a thing of the past and coal has outlasted them.  There are no oil fired power plants left in the United States and less than a dozen major ones left on Earth.  They're yielding, however, to natural gas, which powers quite a few power plants and which as been replacing coal.  And there are other means of generations electrical power, including wind power which now is cheaper than other forms of electrical generations in some regions of the United States.

 

Dave Johnston Power Plant, 2015.  U.S. Government photograph. 

Okay, so what's the point of this? Well, just this.  Coal has been on a long, slow, decline for over a century.  It isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it can't compete economically with other fuels that do the same thing in an increasing range of uses.  Only in terms of coking for steel production is it indispensable.  Indeed, perhaps signalling an international increase in manufacturing, high grade coal for coking has experienced a sharp recovery in recent months. That doesn't do anything locally, however, as our coal is Bituminous Coal, not Anthracite, and therefore can't be used for coking.

This isn't the view of some green fanatic world view.  It's dollars and cents, and coal producing regions, such as Wyoming, have to consider this. Without a way to address coal's defects, and soon, its diminished share of the fuel market will be considerably smaller irrespective of any environmental or regulatory concerns.  It's been a long trend running back over a century.