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

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

Eh?

Did I hear that right?

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

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

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

Track suit wearing eastern european con-man mafia.

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

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

I'm stunned.

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

And not just there, I'd note.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is becoming increasingly common.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, he truly did.

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

And let's not forget George Washington.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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