Tuesday, December 31, 2019

December 31, 1919, New Year's Eve, and . . .

contrary to widespread commentary here and there, it wasn't the last New Year's Eve prior to Prohibition.

A scene not yet arrived.  Woman pouring whiskey into a glass of Coca Cola in 1922.

That's because Wartime Prohibition remained in effect, the Supreme Court having decided that "wartime" meant until a peace treaty with the Central Powers was entered into by the United States, which had not been done.

The war was over, of course, and the Versailles Treaty had been entered into, but the Senate hadn't ratified it. A technical state of war therefore remained. And so did wartime prohibition.  This New Years was dry.

And that even where state prohibition, as in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, hadn't taken effect.

Of course, people here and there did hoist a glass. And bootleg liquor, including deadly wood alcohol stuff, was already making the rounds.  But for a lot of people, indeed most people, this New Years would be celebrated sober.

Looking back on the 1910s

We've now completed the entire decade that is the primary focus of this blog in sort of real time, although in fairness we didn't really start focusing on things in that fashion until 1916.

It's really been interesting.


In terms of the purpose of the blog, this exercise has achieved what we started out to achieve.  The authors now know a lot more about 1910-1919 then they did previously, including everything from details on the Punitive Expedition and the Great War, to picayune details of daily living.

One thing that historians, and we can fancy ourselves that if only from a amateur point of view, tend to do when they look back on an area that they've concentrated on is to to emphasize how that decade changed things, and by saying they emphasize it, they risk overemphasizing it.  Or perhaps its that every major event changes the world in ways that are only appreciated, and large, later on.  But, having noted that risk, we'll go on to say something that's obvious but under appreciated.

The 1910s changed everything.

Things were changing anyway, and in part because they're always changing.  But the pace of change in the 1910s was blistering.  Cheap automobiles had only been introduced in the prior decade, the 1900s, but already by the 1910s they were making major changes in daily life.  Commercial air travel, something completely nonexistent in 1910, as aircraft only dated to 1903, had actually arrived in its infancy and aircraft were also starting to carry the mail.  Serious long distance travel remained the domain of steam locomotives, if on land, and would for many years to come, of course.  On the sea, modern ships now dominated, although surprisingly enough the age of sail hadn't completely passed and wouldn't for another couple of decades.

At the conclusion of the decade, 1919, horses remained a major economic factor and major means of transportation and they would continue to do so into the 1920s and beyond, but what surprised me is, by the end of the decade, the degree to which it was recognized that the day of the horse was in fact rapidly passing.


That passing was causing a revolution in industry that was hugely accelerated by World War One.  The outbreak of the war caused a major increase in the demand for petroleum oil well before the U.S. entered the war, something very much accelerated due to the Royal Navy having started the transition away from coal. That latter trend is one that we're now still playing out to this day, as coal enters what is likely to be its final industrial stage, having been in a decline now for over a century.  At the same time, the 1910s really saw the creation of the Oil Age, which we are still in but which is also in a present state of transformation. The 1914-1919 demand saw an increase in the refining capacity of the United States that would impact towns like Casper Wyoming and convert them into cities with massively increased populations virtually overnight.  That same era saw the last great boom in equine farming in the world, something Wyoming participated in, which was followed by a massive crash.  1919 would be the last year that farmers enjoyed economic parity with urban dwellers in the United States.


That the equine age hadn't passed yet, but was on the way out, was perhaps best demonstrated by the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy that we just featured this past year, but the events of The Punitive Expedition, the Mexican Revolution, World War One, and the Russian Civil War did and were demonstrating that horses remained hugely viable in the present at that very time.  Very little appreciated now, going through events demonstrated this to a great degree.  Motor transport largely failed in the Punitive Expedition.  Horses, and even cavalry, remained employed in the Great War including in France. The German 1918 Spring Offensive, in the end, failed in no small part due to a lack of horse transportation combined with the onset of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

French war dead, World War One.

On that, we might note that in an era when we constantly hear about how bad things are in our own time, the 1910s say the absolute acclimation to death.  The entire Western World engaged in a massive bloodletting on a scale that most would not are endure in our current era.  By the end of the war entire cultures were so used to it that they kept on fighting in bloody civil wars without a let up, making the war fatigue claim we so often hear about the Great War seem rather false.  In the U.S., acclimation to it was so high that the country thought nothing about sending airmen on a cross country race that featured constant fatalities.  Newspaper headlines constantly discussed death by criminal violence, and the country didn't really get that upset about massive race riots that defined 1919 in certain ways.

War dead of the Mexican Revolution, which started before World War One and continued long after.

The country was about to go into the "Roaring Twenties", but like the violence of the post Civil War American West, a question really has to be asked if the violent Roaring Twenties was hugely impacted by the violent 1910s.  Nothing in the 20s or early 30s would replicate the violence of World War One in scale and thousands upon thousands of men were released from wartime service all over the globe with little thought to what they'd been through and how that would impact them.

The 1910s also saw the massive popular onset of Prohibition, which was a movement that gained momentum in the entire English speaking world in that decade. That would help fuel the violence and lawlessness of the 1920s, but at the time to support prohibition was to be a Progressive and to be on the "right side of history".  World War One again caused the movement to accelerate and actually come into being, first as a wartime measure, in the United States.

Christmas Day edition of the Cheyenne State Leader celebrating the permanent passing of John Barleycorn.  It wouldn't be so permanent.

By far, however, the biggest event of the decade, and the one that is still with us today, is the smashing of the Old Order, brought about by World War One, in a fashion which failed to replace it with anything.  That lead to immediate, and long lasting, violence, and the reverberations are still very much with us.

The demise of the imperial and monarchical regimes due to World War One is well known, but the vast impact of it is still poorly understood, particularly because the second great war of the century, World War Two, came to define the century and the aftermath of it, the Cold War, dominated over half of it.  Given that, what occurred before seemed like a prelude when in fact the events are all closely tied and the sorting out of what occurred has still not been completed.  And this is no wonder if we consider that the Old Order was 1,500 years old at the time, in some ways.

By the Old Order, we mean that monarchical system that had dominated in Europe for most of its post Roman Empire period.  Indeed, even now, we live in a period in which the passing of that system is really very brief.  The system was never uniform and isn't anything like its commonly recalled, but its existence was remarkably long lived.

Crowned heads of states, many of whom early on never wore a crown, reentered the European scenes in the 400s as the Roman Empire collapsed.  Indeed, during that period, with the Roman Empire separated into to two governments, in the East it was itself rapidly returning to monarchy.  Following the collapse of the empire in the West, strongmen from Germanic conquering tribes evolved from heads of family groups, the kin into kings, men who were at first heads of tribes, and then of larger bands, and then in later years, that arrived in different places in Europe at different times, then of nations.  By the middle of the Middle Ages the system was unquestionable, even if the legitimacy of an actual monarch may not have been.

Charles the Great receiving the surrender of Widukind at Paderborn, 785

The acceptance of the permanency of a royal family took a much longer period to really arrive.  The post Henry VIII of the United Kingdom gives ample proof of that, with the current royal family not occupying that chair until 1714.  But that most nations would have a monarch, and that monarchs might claim more than one nation, was well accepted.

Which is not to say that it wasn't challenged and that it didn't evolve.  As early as 1215 English noble families, with that status meaning much less than it was to later, were able to force their king, King John, to acknowledge rights that went beyond the crown in the form of the issuance of the Magna Carta.  This act also establishes the permanency of the English Parliament which has existed in various forms since that time.  Parliament became stronger and stronger, as did the concept of representative rule, over the centuries and by 1642 it had become so strong that the Parliament contested the Crown for the rule of the country, suspending the monarch for a period until it was restored in 1660. That event, however, demonstrated that representatives bodies in Europe were now so strong that in Western Europe crowned heads served at their pleasure.

The Magna Carta.

That  pleasure wore out again with Englishmen, this time in the Crown's North American colonies, in 1774 such that by 1776 they declared those colonies independent and, in their following organic documents, they abolished monarch completely in favor of a conservative representative republic.  They had an advantage in their revolution, which went surprisingly rapidly from discontent to separation, in that they already had formed representative bodies and were used to acting independently already.

Declaration of Independence.

That conservative and radical concept provided an example, but in a people with no real democratic habits, in 1789 when the French, or more accurately Parisians, rebelled against their king in a revolution that would ultimately fail but which has ironically set the standard for revolutions ever since.  A person can debate whether the American Revolution or the French one really indicated that the age of monarchy had completely ended, but in truth it had been ending long before either.  The examples, if we include the English example as well, therefore, provide examples of how the end of monarchy could come about, that being either 1) in an orderly developed fashion through a process of natural evolution; or 2) violently and with the institutionalization of disorder as its feature.  The latter example, unfortunately, became a disturbingly common one.

French Charter of 1814, a bill of rights imposed upon Louis XVIII by the Congress of Vienna as a condition for his restoration.

From 1789 on various European monarchies struggled with this evolution.  The United Kingdom, which had started evolving away from monarchy by 1215, handled it best of all, having an institutionalized process for that evolution.  Many other European nations handled it much more poorly.  France went through cycles of revolution, monarchy, and republicanism, before it finally came around to permanent republicanism in 1870.  1848 saw republican revolutions all over Europe.  Other nations saw the old order retrench in their traditional governmental institutions suppressing democratic developments as much as they could, with Germany (which had only been a state since 1870) and Imperial Russia providing prime examples.

Uprising in Berlin in 1848, one of a series of republican revolutions that year which came close to creating a republican German constitutional monarchy only to see it fail due to disorganization.

Where the Old Order hung on with the least amount of surrender to a growing literate class, no matter how marginal that literacy may be, the struggle became malignant.  The difference in developments between societies that had democratic institutions that functioned and those that did not, with the latter often existing only as a bare marginal concession to the inevitable, was stark.  Everywhere, by the late 19th Century, radical challenges to the Old Order existed, even spilling into fully democratic nations that had made the transition well prior, but nowhere were these movements stronger and more active than in those nations that had monarchs who actually functioned as monarchs.  Imperial Russia, where the Czar remained as absolute of monarch as any in the Western World, provides a prime example, although Imperial Germany wasn't really far behind it.

Nicholas Romanov after his abdication.

In spite of the growing strengths of those movements, the nations of the Old Order went into war in 1914 seemingly unified and strong, and indeed the advent of the war in some ways boosted the strength of the monarchs as their populations and what functioning democratic institutions there were, rallied to their nations.  The Imperial German and Austro Hungarian crowns did not suffer from going to war in 1914, and the Imperial Russian one did not for the same.

A dapper Wilhelm Hohenzollern after his abdication, 1933.

The division of nations in terms of their development during that war was not a pure one by any means, but there was one that was notable nonetheless. Republican France and Parliamentary Britain lined up against Imperial Germany and Austria rapidly in the contest.  Various monarchies did join the Allied cause, but all of them were democracies in various degrees except for Imperial Russia, which provided an embarrassing exception until it collapsed in 1917.  On the other side, the Central Powers all featured governments that strongly endorsed central authority and a central authority that was autocratic and invested with the Old Order.  The Central Powers, for that reason, didn't find the Ottoman Empire to be an embarrassing ally the same way the Allied found Russia, as even though its underlying nature was different in every sense, the principal one that identified them, autocracy, was the same.

Halife Abdulmecid Efendi, the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, during his exile.  He came into the position post war and occupied it for the last two years of its existence, which came to an end in 1924.

As soon as the war's stresses became strongly manifest, a struggle which had from the very onset been touched off as a violent protest against Austrian autocracy and empire by a common man, saw working class radicalism develop everywhere in the old imperial regimes except for the Ottoman Empire, where instead nationalist and republican forces began to emerge.  Nowhere in the states most invested in the Old Order was there a long lasting society wide support of its continued existence.

Blessed Charles of Austro-Hungaria, who became the last Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1916 with the war in progress. A devout man, he attempted to secure a separate peace with France upon ascending to the thrown.

The collapse started to come suddenly, first in 1917 in Russia where a decades long smoldering collection of underground forces and a small republican one toppled the Romanov's and then went into a fratricidal civil war against each other.  That followed rapidly into Germany where the forces of the radical extreme left made the continuation of the war by Germany and the continuation of the Hohenzollern monarchy untenable.  Indeed, as Kaiser Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands, the other more local German royal families rapidly collapsed as well, leaving the German Social Democratic Party to deal with the collapse, the rise of the radical left, and a war that had to be immediately concluded.  Germany descended into a brief period of civil war followed by a long period of instability until the forces of the extreme left  and the forces of the extreme right, in the new form of fascism, destroyed the country's democracy in 1932 with the Nazi Party claiming the thrown of the country.


Benito Mussolini, who became the Italian head of state in 1922.

That same story, but in a much less protracted form, had already played out in Italy, which had a parliament going into World War One but which had never been politically stable.  The Fascists toppled the elected government in the 1920s and brought in a new radical right wing order, although it allowed the King to remain on his thrown.  In Spain, which had not fought in the war, the monarch and the republican government collapsed giving rise to a bloody civil war which saw the forces of the right emerge victorious.  Portugal, another Allied power that was a republic but a weak one likewise slid into a dictatorship in the post war period.  Radicalism in Japan, which only had a semi functioning parliamentary body, caused a struggle in the Imperial army, which was divided not only politically but in terms of age, with older, right wing, officers prevailing over young, left wing ones, taking Japan into a finally highly autocratic era under its Old Order, the only one to really survive the period.

The drama also played out in newly liberated lands.  Many new countries oddly opted for constitutional monarchies, trying to somewhat recreate what they'd lately experiences, but some of those did not last long.  Poland briefly had a title to its ancient thrown, backed by Germany, but rapidly became a parliamentary democracy before becoming a practical dictatorship prior to World War Two.  Finland likewise briefly had a German monarch before he resigned in the face of the obvious and the country fought out its own civil war before emerging as a democracy.

Porfirio Diaz in 1910.

Even in North America this drama played out to a degree, and oddly somewhat before that in Europe.  Mexico had struggled since its independence with its own imperial legacy, never finding a way to transform into a functioning democracy.  In 1884 Porfirio Diaz had come to power and, while theoretically an elected head of state, he ruled as a practical imperial monarch, even appearing in his portraits as one.  In 1910, as a result of a stolen election, democratic forces rose up against him and deposed him before they descended into periods or counter revolution and revolution that would last nearly twenty years and which saw initially democratic forces slowly slide into more and more dictatorial ones until Mexico emerged in the 1920s as highly left wing single party state.

Plutarco Elias Calles, who would be the Mexican head of state from 1924 to 1928 and whose extreme left wing policies would lead to the Cristero Rebellion, the last phase of the Mexican Revolution.

All of this is highly significant as it makes the 1910s one of the most pivotal, and perhaps the most pivotal, decades of the 20th Century and modern history.  Vast portions of what was destroyed in terms of intellectual and societal deposit has never been recovered, restored or replaced and the struggles of the subsequent decades have failed to fill the vacuum.  It's common to note that the results of World War One brought about World War Two, and then to note, often in other works, that the conclusion of World War Two brought about the Cold War.  But in fact the cause and effect of the 1914-1918 disaster were far greater than that, and vast as those stated implications are.


In May through October 1917 three Portuguese children claimed to receive visitations by the Virgin Mary, the authenticity of which is widely accepted by Catholics as well as some Orthodox.  As a feature of those visitations, they claimed to have received three messages.*  Among the content that they included in the messages they received was:
If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.
That the war raging in 1917 was to end is obvious to us know, as it ended in about one year following the visitations.  That a worse one greater than the first occurred is of course obvious to all.  And that Russia, the flagship of Communism spread errors around the globe is easy to see as well.  But many have debated what the full extent of those errors were and the degree to which the errors coming out of the cataclysmic of 1914-1918 continue to manifest themselves to this day.

King Alfonso XIII of Spain, whose monarchy was abolished in 1931, only to fall into civil war in 1936.  The Nationalist had no desire to restore him to his thrown.

What is clear is that the strong resistance to the end of the cycle that imperial regimes exhibited from the 1770s onward built up like steam in a sealed vessel before it exploded in 1917.  By that time, that sealed political steam was not only explosive, it was corrupted and infected in that same atmosphere by a radicalism that countries that had developed no democratic habit could contain.  Even in those countries that were democracies, but which were weak ones, such as post 1918 Germany, Italy, and Spain, they proved impossible to contest and contain.  The festering of the far left would bring evolution across the globe from 1917 forward until the Soviet came to an end on December 26, 1991.  The festering of the far right would bring the world into a Second World War in 1939, assuming that earlier imperial far right wing malignancy in the Far East isn't included, in which case the world descended in 1932.  It would take that Second World War and millions of additional deaths to put to an end of the rise of a global far right fascist movement which, while extremely distinct in many ways, shared some of its most malignant traits, including a fascination and advocacy of the application of death, with the far left of Communism.

While that struggle is seemingly now concluded, what was never fully restored was a concept of humanity and natural order that existed earlier on.  The change came too rapidly to be coherent in that fashion and the forces that claimed an organic reason for their positions had not had them exposed in the full light of day before they were let out to spread like viruses.

Indeed, in some remarkable ways, no matter how different, and indeed they were radically different in a plethora of ways, most of the political and societal theory was that governed the globe's societies prior to 1910 may have been, they did have some central principals.  Most of these principals remain, but because of the radicalism of the 1917 explosion, nearly all of them have been challenged, most wish very little thought given to what that challenge meant, and nearly all without the influence of any scientific thought into them.  Indeed, on the latter, social theories that were bootstrapped into political ones of the late 19th Century and early 20th were often justified in the name of "science" when they were quite contrary to it, with horrific examples of the same playing out in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.**

It's always tempting, of course, when looking at an era that you're studying to conclude that that era was the conclusive one to history.  There are so many "pivotal decades" and the like claimed that they can't all be true.  Indeed, perhaps no one claim is really true as history is a stream, not a canal with a series of locks.  Having said that, the 1910s saw a lot of history vastly accelerated, diverted, and broken.  The world has been different since then, and in many ways that are not good ones.  The forces unleashed in the 1910s were akin to opening Pandora's box, and we've never been able to put the disorder that the decade saw released back into any state of order.  Many of the ills and confusion that we experience today have their origins in that fateful ten years.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Sister Lucia, the only one of the three children to live into adulthood, recounted the messages as follows:
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror. 
 You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fátima, on 13 July 1917 was as follows.

I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine. 
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
It was later noted that:
The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the “secret”, such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them.
The Fatima apparitions are widely accepted by Catholics and are also accepted by some Orthodox, as noted.

**The primary example of this would be how the science of genetics morphed into the social and pseudo science of eugenics, which in turn provided a pseudo scientific basis for Nazi racial policies and, ultimately, mass murder.

A lessor, but still disastrous, example would be the "scientific" nature of the Communist economic model which purported that history itself was subject to inviolate economic laws, all of which coincidentally justified the Communist economic model.

Many other such examples, we'd note, in all 20th Century societies, exist.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Clothing

As a collector of odd details for this blog, I'll pick up bits and pieces of something that strike me as worthy of exploration from all over.  One such example is this topic, which occurred to me while listening to Episode 73 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, the Mysterious Death of Somerton Man.

The death is mysterious, that's for sure, but I'm not posting on that. Rather, what I'm posting on is that he noted that all of the decedents clothing tags had been cut out.

Clothing tags?

Yes, clothing tags.

Probably most of us don't own clothing with tags with our name written on them.  I don't.  I think perhaps when I was a little kid some of my clothes did, but that was likely that they didn't get lost at school.

But at one time I noticed that my father's old shirts from his Air Force service had them with his name written in them, or in some cases his name was just written inside the collar.  In asking him about it he indicated that was so that when they went to the laundry they'd know whose shirts they were.  I haven't thought about it since.

Now, to add just a bit, I take my work shirts to the dry cleaners, not to have the dry cleaned, but rather to have them laundered. This is very common for people who wear dress shirts every day as the labor of washing, and then starching them, is an inducement to it.  When I was first practicing law I did that, and only after I got married did I start taking them to the laundry in this fashion. To add a bit to that, when we were first married both my wife and I were working and she asked if she should do my laundry.  I told her no, it hadn't even occurred to me until then, as that didn't seem fair to me.  So I did my own, and for a time after that I continued to wash my own dress shirts and then starch them, which I usually did on a weekend day for all of them at one time.

As time went on, that became a pain.  I don't hugely enjoy ironing shirts (although there are still some that I have that I iron and starch myself), if I'm going to wear them to work, so I followed the lead of my coworkers and started taking them in to be laundered, which I still do, although in writing this it occurs to me that now that the kids are gone, and I wake up at some ridiculously early hour, I should perhaps start considering doing them myself once again.

Anyhow, all of this brings up a couple of things to consider, which are: 1) how cheap, and durable, clothes have become and 2) how convenient laundering now is.

Let's do the second one first.  And let's start with the exciting topic of Water Law as it relates to that.

Water law?

Yes, water law.

As anyone who has practiced law in the West knows, water is a critical factor in everything.  The Wyoming Supreme Court noted early in its history that water was vital to the western economy and not too surprisingly, therefore, steam laundries turn out to be one of the preferential uses of the state's water, as set out statutorily:
41-3-102. Preferred uses; defined; order of preference.

(a) Water rights are hereby defined as follows according to use: preferred uses shall include rights for domestic and transportation purposes, steam power plants, and industrial purposes; existing rights not preferred, may be condemned to supply water for such preferred uses in accordance with the provisions of the law relating to condemnation of property for public and semi-public purposes except as hereinafter provided.

(b) Preferred water uses shall have preference rights in the following order:

(i) Water for drinking purposes for both man and beast;

(ii) Water for municipal purposes;

(iii) Water for the use of steam engines and for general railway use, water for culinary, laundry , bathing, refrigerating (including the manufacture of ice), for steam and hot water heating plants, and steam power plants; and

(iv) Industrial purposes.

(c) The use of water for irrigation shall be superior and preferred to any use where water turbines or impulse water wheels are installed for power purposes; provided, however, that the preferred use of steam power plants and industrial purposes herein granted shall not be construed to give the right of condemnation.
As we've been doing this blog for quite a while now, this in fact turns out to be one of those topics I've addressed before, so I'll link that item in, as I'll often do.

The Journal tapped right into the history of the shirt, partially, and that goes where I want to go a bit here as well.  The Journal observed:
Though the breezily incomplete look also enjoyed a vogue in the bohemian 1970s, its roots go back to the era when collars were starchy, detachable things that men fastened to a basic collarless shirt to appear properly dressed. (The advantage: You could just launder the collars while rewearing a shirt a few times.) That so many contemporary designers are now marketing such shirts to be worn on their own speaks to the steady casualization of modern men’s style. First went the tie, now goes the collar. “Guys just aren’t wearing ties as much,” said Mr. Olberding. “And with a band collar, it’s the anti-tie shirt. You just simply can’t wear [a tie].”
Yep, exactly right (but wait, it's a bit more complicated than that actually).  Hence the scarcity of the shirt type as well.

While the thought of rewearing a shirt, rather than a collar, probably would strike a modern audience as gross, the Journal is right on. We've dealt with it at length in another post, but before the invention of the modern washing machine, people re-wore clothes. They had fewer clothes, they wore quite a bit of wool, and they didn't wash things nearly as often. Frankly, people could do that today, it would not raise a might stench like you might suppose, but people generally don't do that.  I, for one, will toss an Oxford cloth work shirt in the laundry pile after I wear it at a work for one day.  I could, I'm sure, get away with hanging it back up and pressing it for a second, or third, go, but I don't.

But if I had to wash it by hand, I might. And therefore, back in the day, it was easier and practical to have a starched collar that I'd launder first.  Collars get dirty.  And the shirt cold keep on keeping on.  When I was home and not wanting to wear the collar I'd detach it, which of course would give the shirt its casual look by default right then.

 Drew Clothing  Company advertisement for collars, April 1913.  Man, who hasn't had these problems?

When I say "I'd launder", I should note that I mean I'd likely send the collars to the laundry.  Indeed, some laundries advertised this very service.  For example, when Lusk Wyoming had a new laundry come in, prior to World War One, it specifically advertised washing and starting collars.

This small building in Wheatland, Wyoming is still in use.  A newer sign above the door says "Coin Operated Laundry", so perhaps its still in its original use, although presumably not as a "steam laundry".  Its location is just off of the rail line, which was likely a good location for a laundry, although this is a surprisingly small structure, much smaller than the laundry in Lusk was. Anyhow, while we think of laudrimats as being the domain of students and apartment dwellers today, prior to the invention of the washing machine they were a big deal for regular people.  From Painted Bricks.
Indeed, that laundries would  advertise such a service says a lot about the state of washing prior to the invention of the household washing machine.  Most people don't send routine washing to the laundry unless they live in an apartment or are students. But at that time, they did quite often, as the alternatives were basically non existent. Today, quite a few businessmen and women still retain the practice of having their shirts laundered, I should note, and indeed I do (something I adopted after I got married for some reason, as I used to launder all my shirts myself, but after we had kids, it seemed to be a chore I was happy to omit. . . maybe some things don't change as much as we think).  Laundries were so important at the time that they are specifically given a priority in the state's laws on water appropriation.
41-3-102. Preferred uses; defined; order of preference.
(a) Water rights are hereby defined as follows according to use: preferred uses shall include rights for domestic and transportation purposes, steam power plants, and industrial purposes; existing rights not preferred, may be condemned to supply water for such preferred uses in accordance with the provisions of the law relating to condemnation of property for public and semi-public purposes except as hereinafter provided.
(b) Preferred water uses shall have preference rights in the following order:
(i) Water for drinking purposes for both man and beast;
(ii) Water for municipal purposes;
(iii) Water for the use of steam engines and for general railway use, water for culinary, laundry, bathing, refrigerating (including the manufacture of ice), for steam and hot water heating plants, and steam power plants; and
(iv) Industrial purposes.
(c) The use of water for irrigation shall be superior and preferred to any use where water turbines or impulse water wheels are installed for power purposes; provided, however, that the preferred use of steam power plants and industrial purposes herein granted shall not be construed to give the right of condemnation
So I'm covering old ground here, but a century ago, "steam laundries" were a big deal as they had hot water and steam.  You could create that in your own home, of course, but it was a chore.  A chore, I might note, that many women (and it was mostly women) endured routinely, but many people, for various reasons, made use of steam laundries when they could.

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

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

Laundry workers and suffragettes marching, 1914.

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

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

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

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

We've gone through some of this before in terms of the change in styles over the years, but this brings us back to the Mysterious World podcast.  Clothes were expensive, or at least they were considerably more expensive in real terms than they are today, so people had less of them.

Putting this into current economic figures that make sense today is difficult to do, but the cost of clothing in the United States has been dropping for decades.  And while people like to imagine otherwise, with some justification, over the long term, say a century, a much larger percentage of Americans are now middle middle class, upper middle class, or even moderately wealthy, than in prior generations.  A century ago and well into the middle of the 20th Century, most Americans were middle class, but they were lower middle class and in fact lived in constant threat of slipping into poverty.  With less money to go around, and the average cost of many things higher than today in real terms, or taking up a larger percentage of an already stretched budget, all sorts of things simply demanded more of a person's income.  That's one of the things about the "good old days" that people don't recall very accurately.

Starting in the 1970s clothing manufacture started to dramatically depart the American shores and go overseas.  Just in the period from 1994 to 2005 the US lost 900,000 textile jobs to overseas manufacturing, and that doesn't include the tens of thousands of jobs that were lost before that.  Interestingly, it's slightly rebounded quite recently, but clothing made in the US now is actually fairly rare.  The net result has been a massive depression in price in clothing.

At the same time, the inclusion of synthetics, like it or not, has made clothing incredibly durable, although lots of us (myself included) try to avoid synthetics if we can.  The added durability of synthetics is so pronounced that the military purposely uses a cotton synthetic blend in its field clothing, as it makes it tougher, and it is tough.  On a personal level, while I always try to buy cotton work (i.e., office) shirts if I can, I have one button down blended shirt that my wife bought me either when we were first married or maybe even before that I still wear in my shirt rotational line up.  That means that the shirt is now 25 years old and still in good shape, with sharp colors.  I've gone through a lot of good cotton oxford cloth button down shirts in that time that didn't last as long.

By and large, synthetic clothing aside, clothing is just well made now.  Well made and cheap, for the most part.  That means we tend to have quite a bit more of it than we did in earlier eras, which means that all of it in turn last a lot longer than previously. 

Indeed I've heard some people lament the passing of "bespoke" clothing, but by and large, it isn't really necessary now and it can't compete with ready made clothing.

The problem today is that, like food, we tend to have too much clothing.  It's an irony of modern life, and one that makes our appreciation of conditions of the past a bit difficult to grasp based on our common understanding of our own present lives.

November 21, 2013.

That's when Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the "nuclear option" to change the judicial approval rules in the Senate such that only a bare majority of U.S. Senators needed to approve a judicial nomination.

Harry Reid

Which is why the GOP now has a record number of judicial appointees under Donald Trump, rivaled only by the same during the Carter Administration when the Democrats had a large majority.

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Friday, December 27, 2019

Thursday, December 26, 2019

December 26, 1919. The Red Sox trade Babe Ruth.

A look at the news in Albany Count, New York, December 26, 1919.

Elsewhere in New York, on this day in 1919 Babe Ruth was sold by the Boston Rod Sox to the New York Yankees.  The price was $125,000, the largest every paid to that date, and an enormous sum in context.


The Red Sox had one five of the first sixteen World Series.  They would not win another one until 1946.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Merry Christmas!



As always, and as it should be, one of the most joyous, and perhaps the most joyous, time of the year.

Christmas is, of course's Christ's Mass, and has been celebrated by Christians on this date from the very earliest days of the Church.  As always, the the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, delivers a homily at the Mass he celebrates.  This year, his homily was as follows, translated into English.

 “Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined” (Is 9:1). 

The prophecy we heard in the first reading was fulfilled in the Gospel: as shepherds kept watch over their flocks by night, “the glory of the Lord shone around them” (Lk 2:9). In the midst of our earthly night, a light appeared from heaven.

What is the meaning of this light that shone in the darkness? Saint Paul tells us: “The grace of God has appeared”. The grace of God, “bringing salvation to all” (Tit 2:11), has shone on our world this night. But what is this grace? It is divine love, the love that changes lives, renews history, liberates from evil, fills hearts with with peace and joy.

Tonight the love of God has been revealed to us: it is Jesus. In Jesus, the Most High made himself tiny, so that we might love him. But we can still ask ourselves: why does Saint Paul describe the coming of God into our world as “grace”? To tell us that it is utterly free. Whereas on earth everything seems to be about giving in order to get, God comes down freely.

His love is non-negotiable: we did nothing to deserve it and we will never be able to repay it. The grace of God has appeared. Tonight we realize that, when we failed to measure up, God became small for our sake; while we were going about our own business, he came into our midst.

Christmas reminds us that God continues to love us all, even the worst of us. To me, to you, to each of us, he says today: “I love you and I will always love you, for you are precious in my eyes”. God does not love you because you think and act the right way. He loves you, plain and simple. His love is unconditional; it does not depend on you. You may have mistaken ideas, you may have made a complete mess of things, but the Lord continues to love you.

How often do we think that God is good if we are good and punishes us if we are bad. Yet that is not how he is. For all our sins, he continues to love us. His love does not change. It is not fickle; it is faithful. It is patient. This is the gift we find at Christmas. We discover to our amazement that the Lord is absolute gratuity, absolute tender love. His glory does not overwhelm us; his presence does not terrify us. He is born in utter poverty in order to win our hearts by the wealth of his love. The grace of God has appeared.

Grace is a synonym of beauty. Tonight, in the beauty of God’s love, we also discover our own beauty, for we are beloved of God. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, whether happy or sad, in his eyes we are beautiful, not for what we do but for what we are. Deep within us, there is an indelible and intangible beauty, an irrepressible beauty, which is the core of our being. Today God reminds us of this. He lovingly takes upon himself our humanity and makes it his own, “espousing” it forever. The “great joy” proclaimed tonight to the shepherds is indeed “for all the people”. We too, with all our weaknesses and failures, are among those shepherds, who were certainly not saints.

And just as God called the shepherds, so too he calls us, for he loves us. In the dark night of life, he says to us as he did to them, “Be not afraid!” (Lk 2:10). Take courage, do not lose confidence, do not lose hope, do not think that to love is a waste of time! Tonight love has conquered fear, new hope has arrived, God’s kindly light has overcome the darkness of human arrogance.

Mankind, God loves you; for your sake he became man. You are no longer alone! Dear brothers and sisters, what are we to do with this grace? Only one thing: accept the gift. Before we go out to seek God, let us allow ourselves to be sought by him.

Let us not begin with our own abilities but with his grace, for he, Jesus, is the Saviour. Let us contemplate the Child and let ourselves be caught up in his tender love. Then we have no further excuse for not letting ourselves be loved by him.

Whatever goes wrong in our lives, whatever doesn’t work in the Church, whatever problems there are in the world, will no longer serve as an excuse. It will become secondary, for faced with Jesus’ extravagant love, a love of utter meekness and closeness, we have no excuse. At Christmas, the question is this: “Do I allow myself to be loved by God? Do I abandon myself to his love that comes to save me?”

So great a gift deserves immense gratitude. To accept this grace means being ready to give thanks in return. Often we live our lives with such little gratitude. Today is the right day to draw near to the tabernacle, the crèche, the manger, and to say thank you. Let us receive the gift that is Jesus, in order then to become gift like Jesus.

To become gift is to give meaning to life. And it is the best way to change the world: we change, the Church changes, history changes, once we stop trying to change others but try to change ourselves and to make of our life a gift. Jesus shows this to us tonight. He did not change history by pressuring anyone or by a flood of words, but by the gift of his life. He did not wait until we were good before he loved us, but gave himself freely to us.

May we not wait for our neighbours to be good before we do good to them, for the Church to be perfect before we love her, for others to respect us before we serve them. Let us begin with ourselves. This is what it means freely to accept the gift of grace. And holiness is nothing other than preserving this freedom.

A charming legend relates that at the birth of Jesus the shepherds hurried to the stable with different gifts. Each brought what he had; some brought the fruits of their labour, others some precious item. But as they were all presenting their gifts, there was one shepherd who had nothing to give. He was extremely poor; he had no gift to present.

As the others were competing to offer their gifts, he stood apart, embarrassed. At a certain point, Saint Joseph and Our Lady found it hard to receive all the gifts, especially Mary, who had to hold the baby. Seeing that shepherd with empty hands, she asked him to draw near. And she put the baby Jesus in his arms.

That shepherd, in accepting him, became aware of having received what he did not deserve, of holding in his arms the greatest gift of all time. He looked at his hands, those hands that seemed to him always empty; they had become the cradle of God. He felt himself loved and, overcoming his embarrassment, began to show Jesus to the others, for he could not keep for himself the gift of gifts.

Dear brother, dear sister, if your hands seem empty, if you think your heart is poor in love, this night is for you. The grace of God has appeared, to shine forth in your life. Accept it and the light of Christmas will shine forth in you.
Christian pilgrims flocked, as always, to Bethlehem to celebrate the day there.  In Parish, no Masses were held at Notre Dame for the first time since the French Revolution, given the terrible fire of 2019.

Christmas, 1919.

And so Christmas, one year out from the end of the Armistice, arrived.


Much of the news had returned to the routine, although one big new event for much of the country, Prohibition, was making the holiday season a bit different this year, which most newspapers were celebrating.

Otherwise, in the US, the season had returned much to normal, and was very recognizable to us today.


Which included the day for foreign residents living in the U.S.

Christmas morning, Ecuadorian legation, 1919.

The Red Cross remained at work in the distressed regions of the world, including in Siberia, where an effort was made to being Christmas joy to Russian orphans.  You have to wonder how the future for these children played out and if they recalled this Christmas in 1919.










Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Christmas Eve, December 24, 2019. Horses, Missions to Europe, No Arms To Mexico

December 24, 1919. Christmas Eve for that year.

In New York the annual trees for horses was photographed.

 The annual Christmas tree for horses provided by the Animal rescue league in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Christmas tree which was hung with apples, ears of corn and other horse dainties, well filled nose bags were provided.

If this seems odd, keep in mind that Washington D.C, like very major city, had thousands of working horses. This effort was an annual one to take into account the hard work they did in an edible form.


Unfortunately, the prints were heavily damaged at some point.

Also on this day, delegates going to Europe to identify U.S. dead for return were photographed.

Former Sergeant Willie Sandlin of Hyden Ky. who was appointed by Secty. Baker, a special escort for the return of soldier dead from overseas. Sandlin, and Secty. Baker.

By and large, few were returned. Most families chose to leave their family members where they fell, in a tribute to their effort.

Miss Jessie Dell who was appointed take charge of the office to which families of men buried overseas can go to get information regarding their dead.

One nation still at war. . . with itself, was getting cutoff from U.S. Arms. The news hit this day, on Christmas Eve.