Utah's house has passed a bill to ban public transgender bathrooms.
January 25, 2024
Ohio
Ohio's legislature over road a veto and banned gender mutilation of minors and restricted those who have undergone gender mutilation from participating in athletic teams of the opposite gender.
January 31, 2024
New York
New York expanded the definition of rape, which apparently was narrowly defined by the previous law. The new law states:
Section 1. Sections 130.40, 130.45 and 130.50 of the penal law are
REPEALED.
§ 2. Subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.00 of the penal law, subdivision 2 as amended by chapter 264 of the laws of 2003, are amended read as follows:
1. "[Sexual intercourse] VAGINAL SEXUAL CONTACT" [has its ordinary meaning and occurs upon any penetration, however slight] MEANS CONDUCT BETWEEN PERSONS CONSISTING OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE PENIS AND THE VAGINA OR VULVA.
2. (a) "Oral sexual [conduct] CONTACT" means conduct between persons consisting of contact between the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the anus, or the mouth and the vulva or vagina.
(b) "Anal sexual [conduct] CONTACT" means conduct between persons consisting of contact between the penis and anus.
§ 3. Section 130.25 of the penal law, as amended by chapter 1 of the laws of 2000, is amended to read as follows:
§ 130.25 Rape in the third degree.
A person is guilty of rape in the third degree when:
1. He or she engages in [sexual intercourse] VAGINAL SEXUAL CONTACT with another person who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor other than being less than seventeen years old;
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have made it a crime for noncitizens to enter the state through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry
New Hampshire
The state has banned men mutilated to appear as women from appearing in women's sports.
March 22, 2024
Arizona
Arizona had declared Pluto as the official state planet.
March 31, 2024.
Oregon
Oregon recriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs after botching a decriminalization effort.
April 2, 2024.
Colorado
A bill in Colorado that aims to protect the data found in a person's brainwaves was signed into law.
Colorado's Democratic House passed a bill that bans a wide variety of "assault" firearms.
Inaccurately reported on as banning semi-automatic firearms, which it does not, it does take on a lot of popular longarms with military type features.
It's doubtful that it will pass Colorado's Senate, and if it does, it's likely unconstitutional.
April 18, 2024.
Montana
Two genitals mutilated men have filed suit in Montana over a new Montana law that keeps them from having their actual gender changed on government issued identification.
April 19, 2024.
Arizona
Arizona has repealed an 1864 territorial law that banned most abortions. Press reporting on this has been unclear, so it's not clear if it repealed and replaced the statute or what, but a review of the text of the very short law shows it simply repealed the law. Some digging shows a a 2002 statute banning abortion after 15 weeks will become the law.
Florida
Florida has banned artificial meat.
May 3, 2024
Florida
Gov. DeSantis signed into law a bill that de-emphasizes climate considerations in Florida's energy considerations.
May 17, 2024
Louisiana
Louisiana has passed and signed in to a law a requirement that the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms.
June 20, 2024
New Hampshire
New Hampshire has banned gender mutilated boys in grades 5 through 12 from participating in girls' sports.
242 Jewish individuals arrived in Palestine under the Third German Palestinian Exchange, a peculiar event that's almost forgotten. Under the odd arrangement, Jews in occupied Europe were exchanged for Germans in Palestine, most of whom were "Templer Germans".
The Templer Germans were residents of settlements that had been established in Palestine during Ottoman rule in 1868 and continued on into the 20th Century. Originally part of the German Pietist Templer movement, the Nazi Party made a heavy effort to Nazify the colonies after they came to power in Germany. Their numbers decreased over time, and never numbered more than 2,000. They were declared enemy aliens by the British at the start of World War Two, and many were interned in Australia. The British, however, brokered a deal in which 1,000 Templers were exchanged for 550 Jews, most of whom had Palestinian connections. After the Second World War, the remaining members came under heavy pressure, with their leader at the time being assasinated, to leave newly founded Israel.
I have to note that being deported to Germany in this time frame would be an epic bummer, although like Italian colonies in Libya, and French ones in Algeria, the small German settlements in Palestine were not long for the world.
Enduring a second blitz, 41,000 mothers and children left London for countryside billets to avoid V1 bombs.
Having taken D-Day objective Caen, the British moved towards expanding their lines under stuff resistance.
The Finns won a second battlefield victory in two days, this time prevailing at Vyborg Bay.
The Battle of Driniumor River began near Aitape, New Guinea with a Japanese assault of Allied positions there.
The SS Duilio, interned at Trieste, was sunk by Allied aircraft.
The Third French Republic and the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam executed the Treaty of Saigon. The treaty granted economic and territorial concessions to France. France waived a previous war indemnity award from Vietnam in the treaty from 1862 and promised military protection against China. Vietnam was reduced to a French protectorate.
France already occupied three provinces south and east of the Mekong and had since 1867. They became the French colony of Cochinchina. The Red River, Hanoi, Haiphong and Qui Nhơn were opened to international trade. France recognized "the sovereignty of the king of Annam and his complete independence from any foreign power" (la souveraineté du roi d'Annam et son entière independence vis-à-vis de toute puissance étrangère). France understood this to mean independence from Chinese influence, although neither Vietnam nor China understood the terms in that fashion.
The topic was African slaves in the United States, and what to do about/with them. Jefferson advocated for establishing an American colony in Africa.
Sparks was a very early Unitarian minister who had served as the Chaplain for the House of Representatives, and who would go on to serve as the President of Harvard. He died in 1866 at the age of 76, having therefore had a life span which would have overlapped the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War. Fairly typically for the era, he'd been married twice, his first wife having been taken by death when they'd been married only three years.
Log cabins and cider were the symbols of the Whigs.
The Whig party formed in 1833, making it just a few years younger than the Democratic Party. It was a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, although most articles will claim it was a "conservative" party.
It opposed populist Andrew Jackson, a Democratic populist.
William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachery Taylor and Millard Fillmore were members of the Whigs.
A lot of its policies were very reasonable in a modern conservative context. What it couldn't adjust to, however, was slavery, and the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, broke it up in 1856. Those members of the party who came down as solidly anti-slavery formed the new Republican Party, which was also a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, with anti-slavery added to it.
The GOP went from birth to the White House in just four years.
The Whigs drew from the Democratic Republican Party that preceded it, but it drew from other camps as well. Not only did the old Democratic Republicans come into it, but Democrats did as well as that party became increasingly populist.
Note that.
The Whigs were a major center left American political party. The Democrats were a conservative, populist party. The Whigs of the 1850s would have recognized the Republican Party of the 1950s as their successor.
Note what happened, and perhaps more importantly, how quickly it can happen.
The classic bromide of American politics is that third parties don't succeed.
Some do.
The Whigs came out of a prior political party's period of turmoil. They consolidated around solid, government backed, economics and a policy of what would amount to anti discrimination for the era. As a result of that, it attracted businessmen, quasi liberals, and (immigrant) Catholics. It won several elections before spectacularly breaking up.
The GOP has been around much longer, but at least in its early periods up to the Great Depression, and then again from 1950 on, up until Ronald Reagan, it was much like the Whig Party it had replaced, but with civil rights added as an element. Ronald Reagan, as much as he is admired by conservatives, began to dismantle that when the Democrats incorporated civil rights into its makeup starting in the 50s and 60s. The Democrats had been struggling with its southern membership, which very much reflected the views of the traditional party, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt. Southern Democrats stuck with the party as they had nowhere else to go, until Reagan cynically offered them one.
Now that element has taken over the party.
The GOP nearly cracked up in 1912 when the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the party, which wanted to take the party much to the left, and make it much more liberal/populist, bolted. That same year, the Democratic Party began its evolution into a liberal party by running Woodrow Wilson, drawing in disaffected Republican populists.
Note that.
It took twenty years, but by 1932 TR's cousin FDR put the liberals in the Democratic Party permanently in control, Wilson's bid having transformed the party permanently. It took roughly 30, but Ronald Reagan did the same thing with the Dixiecrats he incorporated into the GOP, that having also transformed the party permanently. It took the Democrats 40 years to start shedding the Dixiecrats. It took about 40 years for the Dixiecrats Reagan invited into the Republican Party to start a GOP civil war.
Conservatives gush about Reagan, and with some good reasons. He was the country's one and only really conservative President. Prior Republicans had fit more into the Whig mold. Those who came after him sort of recalled it, like the first Bush, or fit into a new Neo Con mold that real conservatives tended to despise. Reagan's Presidency was transformational, however, in that it inserted certain conservative strains of thought into government, while it never got a hold of the nation's budget, which has become increasingly out of whack due to the tax cuts he and Republican successors introduced.
But what he also introduced, Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats, infected the party and now has killed it. The "Republican" Part of today is the Dixiecrat Party/Rust Belt Democrat Party in a very real sense. It's populist, but not conservative.
There are holdout Republican elements within it, but they have no hope of taking it back. The past three years have proven that. Trump Populists don't care that Trump tried to seize power illegally. They see class enemies everywhere which justify their positions, something Democrats just don't grasp. Democrats like Robert Reich run around wondering when they'll wake up, not realizing they're wide awake.
When the Whigs broke up, it took the GOP only a few years to become successful. The Whig collapse in 1856 was followed by the Republican success of 1860.
That's lesson number 1. New parties can succeed quickly when the old one dies.
Lesson number 2 is that opposing parties become complacent. The Democratic Party after 1912 didn't worry about its southern base and allowed it to go into the Republican Party, which briefly helped the GOP, and then killed it. The Whigs took not only from the collapsed Democratic Republicans but also from the Democrats themselves.
The current Democratic Party is the legacy of 1912 the same way that the GOP is the legacy of 1980. Just as the GOP has gone Dixiecrat/Rust Belt Democrat, the Democratic Party has gone Ivy League Pink. It's nearly as enfeebled as the GOP is right now, it's just not as obvious.
A new party must emerge to replace the GOP, and frankly it now will. Conservatives have no home and need to find one. Centrist, however, have no home as well. People who believed in Reagan's social conservatism aren't the same people who vote for serial polygamist and icky Donald Trump. Democrats that voted for a guy like Harry Truman aren't comfortable with Joe Biden, at least in the expression he's manifested himself. 49%, at least, of the electorate are independents who have already dumped the GOP or the Democratic Party.
The one, and only, thing the Democrats and the Republicans agree on is that you absolutely must not vote for a third party, as that helps the other guy. That thinking insures that the extremes of those two parties have a free ride.
Well, the party is over and on the GOP side, the people have gone home. This election, or the next, a new center right party must form, and will form.
If it formed now, with a Manchin or Christie at its head. It'd take the election, and the GOP would completely collapse. Quite a bit of the Democratic Party would defect as well.
Coming at a particularly odd time, given the resurgence of the type of views that the monument represents1, the Federal Government is removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
A massive allegorical work, the monument by Moses Jacob Ezekiel2portrays the Southern cause heroically, and includes a slave in the "mammy" role, saddened by the departure of her soldier owner.
Probably always offensive, the work was part of the rise of the Lost Cause myth in the early 20th Century, which is when many of these monuments date from. It's being removed and will be relocated at a park dedicated to Confederate monuments.
This process has been going on for a while. Under President Biden, military posts named for Confederate generals have been renamed, but even before that, monuments in Southern states started coming down on a local basis. Interestingly, right now the Southern cause is strongly in mind as Donald Trump tacks closer and closer to the secessionist's view of the nation that brought the war about and which preserved racial segregation for a century thereafter.
The monument itself was located in the Confederate Section of Arlington, which was created in 1900 at the request of those who felt that Confederate dead in the cemetery should be located together. Ironically, the move was opposed by some in the South, who felt that they should be relocated to "Southern soil". Laying of the cornerstone of the monument came in 1912, and it was dedicated, Woodrow Wilson in attendance, in 1914.
Wilson at dedication of the monument in 1914.
Things like this are particularly problematic in various ways. For one thing, the monument is a work of art, and as such it has its own merits, no matter how dramatically flawed its image of the Southern cause was. And they have, interestingly, an image of the South which was, while false, sort of bizarrely aspirational in that it depicted, as many such monuments of that period for that cause do, a South which was a yeoman state, when in reality the South was controlled by strong large scale economic interest to the detriment of the Southern yeoman, and certainly to the massive detriment of Southern blacks.
And they also reflect a period of American history, lasting roughly from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era, when the nation as a whole adopted a false view of itself, or at least a large portion of itself. They reflect, therefore, the zeitgeist of that time and our own. Removing the monuments is understandable, but it doesn't cure the massive defect of past racism and slavery. It does serve to help us forget how racist we once were, and not only in the 1776 to 1865 time frame, but the 1865 to mid 1970s time frame as well.
Footnotes:
1. Just this past week Donald Trump, whose acolytes sometimes brandish the Confederate battle flat at his events, or in support of him in general, spoke of immigrants "poisoning" the blood of Americans, much like Southern Americans sometimes did in regard to desegregation in the 1960s. The Nazi allegory has come up frequently, but to my ear, perhaps because I'm old enough to remember the tail end of that era, it sounds more the Southern view of the 60s or even 70s.
2. This work is by far Ezekiel's best known one. Interestingly, another major one is an allegorical monument from the 1870s dedicated to and entitled Religious Liberty.
That's the story, Mt. Evans in Colorado has been renamed Mt. Blue Sky.
The mountain was named after Colorado Territorial Governor John Evans. The Civil War era Governor was obviously popular enough at the time, but his association with the Sand Creek Massacre has caused his memory to tarnish over the years. That association may be noted here:
1864 Colorado Governor John Evans warns that all peaceful Indians in the region must report to the Sand Creek reservation or risk being attacked. This set in motion that lead to the chain of events that caused the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, The Battle of Red Buttes, and the Battle of Platte Bridge Station.
1864 Sand Creek Massacre in which Colorado militia attack Black Kettle's Cheyenne band in Colorado. Black Kettle was at peace, and the attack was unwarranted. The unit would muster out shortly thereafter. The attack would drive many Cheyenne north into Wyoming and western Nebraska, where they would link up with Sioux who were already trending towards hostility with the United States. This would result in ongoing unbroken armed conflict between these tribes and the United States up through the conclusion of Red Cloud's War.
In 2020, current Colorado Governor Polish established The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board which suggested the new name, which was approved by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Clear Creek County approved the renaming in 2022.
Evans' reassessment is an example of how such reappraisals have occured post World War Two. Evans was forced to resign as a result of the Sand Creek Massacre and was accused of a cover-up in regard to it, but nonetheless, as late as 1963 he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Charitable in many things, other than his views on the fate of Native Peoples, various things were named for him, including Mount Evans, a World War Two destroyer and the Evans Chapel at the University of Denver, the latter of which he had built in memory of a daughter.
CV-12, the second aircraft carrier of World War Two to be named the USS Hornet, was launched.
CV-12 being launched.
CV-8, the USS Hornet that had been in the Doolittle Raid, was sunk in October, 1942.
CV-12 was the eighth U.S. Navy ship to bear that name, the first being a merchant sloop acquired by the infant U.S. Navy in 1775 and captured by the Royal Navy during the Revolution. A second USS Hornet, also a sloop, was acquired in the Mediterranean during the First Barbary War, but served for only a year.
CV-8 was named in honor of a sloop of war commissioned in 1805. She's served in the War of 1812, but had been lost due to a material failure at sea in 1829, going down with all hands.
The foundering of CV-8's namesake.
The fourth was a schooner acquired in 1814 that mostly served the Navy by running messages.
The fifth ship to bear that name was a captured and renamed Confederate steam ship. Its career with the US Navy was brief, and she then went on to a brief career with filibusters, being renamed Cuba.
The Red Army captured Sokolovskym Yelna, and Taganrog.
In his second act of heroism, Lt. Kenneth Walsh, would push his deeds over the top as a Marine Corp aviator and win the Medal of Honor. His citation reads:
For extraordinary heroism and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty as a pilot in Marine Fighting Squadron 124 in aerial combat against enemy Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands area. Determined to thwart the enemy's attempt to bomb Allied ground forces and shipping at Vella Lavella on 15 August 1943, 1st Lt. Walsh repeatedly dived his plane into an enemy formation outnumbering his own division 6 to 1 and, although his plane was hit numerous times, shot down 2 Japanese dive bombers and 1 fighter. After developing engine trouble on 30 August during a vital escort mission, 1st Lt. Walsh landed his mechanically disabled plane at Munda, quickly replaced it with another, and proceeded to rejoin his flight over Kahili. Separated from his escort group when he encountered approximately 50 Japanese Zeros, he unhesitatingly attacked, striking with relentless fury in his lone battle against a powerful force. He destroyed 4 hostile fighters before cannon shellfire forced him to make a dead-stick landing off Vella Lavella where he was later picked up. His valiant leadership and his daring skill as a flier served as a source of confidence and inspiration to his fellow pilots and reflect the highest credit upon the U.S. Naval Service.
Lt. Walsh had joined the Marine Corps in 1933 and retired in 1962, flying again in action during the Korean War. He died at age 81 in 1998.
The Lackawanna Limited wreck occurred when a Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad passenger train, the New York-Buffalo Lackawanna Limited collided with a freight train. Twenty-seven people were killed in the collision, and about twice that number injured, many from steam that poured into the railroad cars.
On this day in 1923, Silent Cal Coolidge, staying on the family homestead in Vermont, was awoken in the early morning hours, and then went back to bed.
Coolidge was a Massachusetts barred lawyer from Vermont, who had entered the profession at the urging of his father after graduating from Amherst. He practiced commercial law and operated under the maxim that he best served his client's by staying out of court, showing his wisdom. While practicing law he entered local politics, rose in that field, and had become Governor of Massachusetts prior to becoming Harding's Vice President.
Harding died at 7:30 p.m. on August 2. He had fallen ill, as we have noted, on his trip sought from a Canadian port of call on his Voyage of Understanding, with his illness first attributed to food poisoning. The exact cause of his death has never really been determined, and there's some speculation that the nature of medical knowledge of the day contributed directly to it. The Coolidge residence in Vermont lacked electricity or telephones and Coolidge wasn't informed until after 2:00 a.m.. He dressed, said a prayer, went downstairs and took the oath of office from his father, who was a notary.
He then went back to bed.
Coolidge was a wise and practical man.
Later in the day Coolidge would take the train to Washington, D.C.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis suspended baseball for the day.
The Irish Free State passed the Defence Forces (Temporary Provisions) Act", to create "an armed force to be called Oglaigh na hEireann (hereinafter referred to as the Forces) consisting of such number of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men as may from time to time be provided".
Nazir Gayed Roufail (نظير جيد روفائيل, IPA: [nɑˈzˤiːɾ ˈɡæjjed ɾʊfæˈʔiːl]) was born Salaam, Egpyt. He would become Pope Shenouda III (Coptic: Ⲡⲁⲡⲁ Ⲁⲃⲃⲁ Ϣⲉⲛⲟⲩϯ ⲅ̅ Papa Abba Šenoude pimah šoumt; Arabic: بابا الإسكندرية شنودة الثالث Bābā al-Iskandarīyah Shinūdah al-Thālith) of the The Coptic Orthodox Church (Coptic: Ϯⲉⲕ̀ⲕⲗⲏⲥⲓⲁ ⲛ̀ⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ ⲛ̀ⲟⲣⲑⲟⲇⲟⲝⲟⲥ, romanized: Ti-eklisia en-remenkimi en-orthodhoxos; Arabic: الكنيسة القبطية الأرثوذكسية, romanized: al-Kanīsa al-Qibṭiyya al-ʾUrṯūḏuksiyya). He would occupy that position for over 40 years.
The Coptic Church is not in communion with Rome, but is an Apostolic Christian Church with Apostolic Succession. The Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church grew closer together during his reign.
Confederate spy Laura Ratcliffe, universally recognized as gracious and cheerful, died after being bedridden following an accident at her home in Virginia. She was 87.
Metis leader Ambroise-Dydime Lépine, who had been sentenced to death due to his role in the Red River Rebellion, but whose sentence had been commuted to five years in exile, died at age 83. He is buried next to his co-rebel, Metis Louis Riel, at the St. Boniface Cathedral in Winnipeg.
Lex Anteinternet: A normal winter.: A normal winter. That's exactly what we're having. The weather here has been normal. And in Central Wyoming, that means multiple be..
After I posted the item above, it occurred to me that part of the complaining people do about winter is because they've so been able to defeat natural conditions in their daily lives and then, although only rarely, nature comes along and reminds you it's dominant for the most part. So far, our means of defeating it only do so in fairly average conditions.
Now, these are fairly average conditions, but people aren't used to them. And there are some things you can't get around. Six foot drifts on the Interstate highway, for example, are one such thing.
Anyhow, this caused me to recall that there was a time when people just basically endured these things. It's always easy to say that, but it's true.
Thinking back to when I was a teenager in high school, and fewer people lived on the mountain, it was the case that the county used to annually simply inform people that the mountain road was not its first priority. So if you lived up there, they'd get around to the road after they'd cleared every other country road. It was last. If you didn't like it, don't live there, was the message. People still complained, but not as much, and they didn't receive much sympathy either.
Ranchers, much like now, really didn't expect to get plowed out at all. During the famous Blizzard of 1949 there were instances in which aircraft were ultimately flown over some ranches to see if the occupants of them were in trouble. They didn't have phones or their lines were down. Having known some of the ranchers who experienced that when I was young, their reaction was surprise. They didn't expect anyone to send out an airplane, and they didn't figure they'd be regarded as imperiled for the most part. There were excepts that year, I should note, which resulted in the Wyoming Air National Guard dropping hay for cattle.
This blog started off with the pre World War One era. What about these environs, then?
Cars already existed, and the predominant car of the era, the Model T, would actually have been a fairly good car for the conditions. It has high clearance, thin wheels, low gearing, and it was fairly heavy for its size. Therefore, it was a good car, to some degree, for snow.
It wasn't a four-wheel drive, of course, and the snow we've been getting has been phenomenal.
Snow removal wasn't a thing anywhere before Milwaukee started doing it in 1862. For the most part, most municipalities didn't do it, however, until the automobile era. Quite a bit of plowing originally was done with draft horses, and this continued on until after World War Two to some extent. When streets started to be plowed I don't know, and it's a little difficult to tell, without going through piles of old newspapers to find out. The oldest example I could find was a municipal truck plowing snow in Washington, D.C. in 1916, which is frankly earlier than I would have guessed.
You don't have to have paved roads to have roads that are plowed, but it helps. In 1916, Washington had paved streets. Photographs of Casper show it having maintained dirt roads in the early 1920s. I'm sure that by the 1930s, they were mostly paved. What I don't know is when the city started plowing the snow. A photograph that's online from the Wyoming State Archives shows the Wyoming Highway Department's first snow plow, when it was purchased, which has a date of 1923, just one hundred years ago coincidentally enough. It's probably safe to assume the State didn't plow any highways prior to that. Another photo from the same source shows the local high school's snowplow, which is mounted to a tractor, and has a date of 1930. All in all, plowing the streets and highways must have come on during the 20s and 30s.
Older newspapers also show that in the 20s, the State simply closed more highways than it does now. Some highways are still closed for winter, but at least in the early 1920s the State simply closed, for example, the highway between Shoshone and Thermopolis. Of course, you could, at that time, still make that trip by train.
That brings up this, which we've addressed before. Prior to World War Two, 4x4 vehicles were a real rarity and tended to be confined to industrial operations or logging. Ranchers didn't have 4x4 vehicles, and regular people certainly did not. For that matter, early 4x4s were a real slow moving off-road affair, and they wouldn't have been very useful for most people. It was the U.S. Army that really started the development of the road capable all wheel drive vehicle and it took World War Two to really make them common. Even after the war, it took a long while before very many town residents owned a 4x4.
This meant that once winter came, winter travel in and out of towns became much more limited. Sure, in the 20s, when the weather improved, you could venture out, and people no doubt did. But busting drifts and the like became a post-war thing, and wouldn't have really become common until the 1960s for town residents. Ranchers, for that matter, kept more employees at the time and some of them were stationed in the remoter areas of larger ranches so that they could take care of necessary chores during the winter. In some instances, that meant that cowhands were stationed in remote cabins all winter long, and were checked on rarely, if at all. And they spent the winter there without television or the internet, or for that matter, electricity.
Of course, the other thing this meant is that people whose livelihoods were in town, lived in town. People didn't live on small acreages outside of town, for the most part, if they had jobs in town. If you needed to be in the office, you needed to be within a reasonable distance, which often meant walking distance, of the office. For that matter, people with industrial employment tended to live near it.
The point of all of this, other than things were different then? Well, they were different then.
They were different, for that matter into the 1980s.
And maybe folks need to have a little patience now.
Dust Bowl farmers, from an era when the GOP would have done pretty much nothing.
TRIBUTE TO HARRIET HAGEMAN
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it is fitting that Harriet Hageman will be inducted into the 2011 Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame. Harriet is known across Wyoming and across our Nation as a stalwart promoter and defender of agriculture. With this honor, she is following in the footsteps of her father Jim Hageman, who was previously inducted in the Agriculture Hall of fame in 2002.
Harriet comes from a long history of agricultural producers. Her great grandfather homesteaded in Wyoming in 1879 and her parents bought their first ranch near Fort Laramie in 1961. Harriet grew up on the family’s cattle ranches in the Fort Laramie area. Rather than pursuing a career in agriculture, she earned a law degree from the University of Wyoming. Yet she did not stray from the agriculture industry. Much of her legal practice has been focused on protecting agriculture’s land, water, and natural resources. She uses her Ag background coupled with her fine mind to effectively argue on behalf of Wyoming’s ranchers and farmers in courtrooms at all levels of the judiciary.
A few of her many accomplishments should be noted. Harriet was the lead attorney for the State of Wyoming in protecting its share of the North Platte River. She fought the USDA to protect Wyoming’s access to national forest lands. She successfully defended Wyoming’s Open Range Law before the Wyoming Supreme Court. Her clients include ranchers, farmers, irrigation districts and grazing permitees. Harriet represents them with a passion that can only come from love of agriculture.
I have had the honor of working with Harriet Hageman and have benefitted from her wisdom. I would ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating
Harriet on this well-deserved honor.
John Barasso in the Congressional Record, August 2, 2011.1
CHUCK TODD: You know, you actually vote less with Joe Biden than Kyrsten Sinema does. You're comfortable being a Democrat in Montana. Why is that?
SEN. JON TESTER: Look, I'm also a farmer. And I can tell you that we would not have the farm today if it was not for the Democratic politics of FDR. And my grandfather and grandmother talked to us about that, my folks talked to me about that. And I will tell you that I am forever grateful for that, because I'm blessed to be a farmer, I love agriculture, and I wouldn't be one without the Democrats.
Meet the Press, December 11, 2022.
I wouldn't be a rancher but for the Democrats. No Wyoming rancher born in Wyoming would be.
Harriet Hageman, born on a ranch outside of Ft. Laramie, Wyoming, wouldn't have been born on a ranch but for the Democrats. If Herbert Hoover had won the election of 1932, she'd have been born in a city somewhere else, if she'd been born at all (and likely would not have, given the way twist of fates work). She sure wouldn't have been born on a ranch/farm.
The Democrats saved agriculture in the 1930s in the West, Midwest and North. They didn't do it any favors in the South, however.
My wife's grandfather, a World War Two Marine, and born on a ranch, remembered that and voted for the Democrats for the rest of his life.
So why do so many in agriculture vote Republican, even though Republican policies would have destroyed family agriculture in the 1930s and still stand to destroy family agriculture in the US today?
Well, a lot of reasons. But it'd be handy if people quit babbling the myths about it.
Indeed, when a person like Hageman states "I'm a fourth generation rancher", or things that effect, it ought to be in the form of an apology followed by "and yet I'm a Republican. . . "
Let's take a look at the reality of the matter.
Farm Policy from colonization up until the close of the Frontier.
Puritans on their way to church. Something that's often omitted in depictions of the Puritans is how corporate early English colonization was. English Colonists may have had individual economic and personal goals, and no doubt did in order to set off on such a risky endeavor, but they were often also sponsored by backers who had distince economic goals and expectations. They remained heavily dependent upon the United Kingdom in that fashion. They also did not, at first, exist as individualist, but part of a community that featured very strict rules.
Up until January 1, 1863, farmers didn't acquire "virgin lands" by the pure sweat of their brow, as the myth would have everyone seemingly believe.
Let's start with a basic premise.
When the Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and the English Jamestown in 1622, there were already people here.
I don't think that's a shocker for anyone, but in recent years, the political right has taken this as a bit of a threat for some reason. It's simply the truth. Natives occupied the land.
The concept of the settlers, very loosely, was that the natives didn't have as good of a claim to the land as Europeans did, as essentially their agricultural exploitation, if existent at all, was not as developed as that of the Europeans. In English colonies, it led to the concept of Aboriginal Title, which recognized that Indian nations did in fact have certain sovereign rights, including title, to land, but that it was inferior to that of the Crown, which was a more developed, civilized, sovereign. The Crown could and did extinguish aboriginal title.2
After American Independence, this concept endured. The United States, not the states, but the United States Government, held title of lands. States could hold title, but their title was co-equal with aboriginal title, not superior. Generally, however up until 1862, the United States extinguished most, but not all, aboriginal title prior to a territory becoming a state, and upon statehood ceded the unoccupied public lands to the states. This gave rise to the wackadoodle concept in recent years that the Federal government retains an obligation to do that and must "turn over" Federal lands to the states, a position which should return the adherents of those asserting it to Kindergarten to start all over again in their educations.
After the Mexican War the United States found itself with a double land title problem. For one thing, it wasn't at all certain how to deal with the titles of New Mexicans and Californios who had title from Mexico or Spain. That had to be recognized, of course, but the government was troubled by it in part because in defeating Mexico it hadn't acquired all of the Mexican administration along with that.
The other problem, in its view, is that it acquired a big swath of territory that nobody except wild aboriginals and nearly as wild courier du bois wanted to reside in.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was the answer.
It's no mistake that the Homestead Act was a Civil War measure. In addition to the other problems the US now had a big population of rootless people it wasn't sure what to do with, and this provided a relief valved. And the Southern States being out of the government temporarily opened up the door for the (then) progressive Republicans to really emphasize their use of the American System, which as a semi managed economy with lots of Federal intervention. The Democrats, much like the current GOP, opposed government intervention in the economy.
So the GOP backed a new concept in which the US would directly give the public domain to homestead entrants if they put in at least five years of labor. This too really struck at the South, as the pattern in the South had come to favor large landed interests which destroyed a farm through cotton production agriculture, and then bought new land further west and started again.
Note the essence of this here. Prior to 1863, a farmer seeking land, or a would be farmer, had to buy it from somebody, or the Federal government, or the state. Yes, people moved west and cleared land, but they didn't just get it for nothing.
After 1862 they could, by putting in the labor.
That system massively favored small, and poor, farmers, and disfavored large monied interests. You could still buy the public domain, but entities doing that were in direct competition with those getting it for their labor. It weighted things in favor of the small operator.
Which gave us, for example, the Johnson County War.
We don't think of the Johnson County War as an economic class struggle, and indeed it makes a person sound like a Marxist if you do, but it was. Perhaps in Chestertonian terms, it was a contest between production agricultural and agrarians, which would be closer to the mark. We've discussed the Johnson County War before, and will simply loop that dicussion in:
That got ahead or our story a bit, but consider this.
The homestead act brought the small operators in. The big operators kept coming in. When small operators were the beneficiaries of a Federal land program. When the inevitable contest between the two came, the Federal government sided with the small operators through the intervention of the U.S. Army.
Now let's consider the role of the Army.
All this land was available in the first place as, after the Mexican War, the Federal Government had provided the Army to "deal with" the Indians. Dealing with them meant removing them onto Reservations. Prior to the Mexican War, Native Americans were mostly "dealt with" by the states or even simply by individuals, which made the Indian Wars prior to the Mexican War ghastly bloody affairs, something amplified by the fact that the invention of the Rifle Musket (not the musket, or a rifle, but the Rifle Musket) gave industrialized Americans a real weapons advantage over the Natives for the very first time.
Now, in complete fairness, the Army didn't enter the West like a German SS Division, and the Army spent a lot of time just trying to keep the age-old warfare between European Americans and the Natives from going on. But it was a massive Federal intervention with the result of removing the Natives from their lands even if the reality of what occurred wasn't seen that way, fully, or by everyone, at the time.
The net result is that agriculture in the west was the beneficiary of a massive, liberal-progerssives set of agriculture policies that favored poorer agriculturalist, if not necessary poor agriculturalist.
Put another way, it wasn't the rugged pioneer finding unoccupied virgin soil in the west and creating a farm or ranch out of the pure sweat of their brows and dirt on their fingers. That was involved, but they were given the thing they needed the most, the land, for nothing but that work, and their presence was backed up by the Federal Government, including in an armed fashion if necessary.
The close of the frontier until the 1920s.
The US has always had some sort of farm policy and a lot of it is monetary in nature, and I'm not qualified to really expand on that. What I can say there I basically already have.
In 1890 Frederick Jackson Turner, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. This was one year after the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush which had opened up a vast amount of Indian lands to settlement again on the basis that they weren't in productive use, as European Americans saw it. In 1890, they all were, according to the Census Bureau.
At that point, the Homestead Act should have been repealed, having succeeded in its goal, but its in the nature of Federal programs that they always live on well after they should die. Guaranteed Student Loans provide a current example. So nothing changed
Then came World War One.
World War One sparked a global agricultural crisis.
Little noted, by and large, the world's economy had globalized to an extent which was only recently reestablished (and probably surpassed, maybe). The Great War destroyed that, and part of what it destroyed was global agriculture. The massive Russian and Ukrainian wheat supply was removed from the market as part of that, and this in turn started a massive American homesteading rush, with people who had little knowledge of farming flooding the prairie's to be dry land farmers, something which boosters insisted couldn't fail. At first, in fact, it didn't. The crisis carried on through the war, along with a massively boosted demand for agricultural commodities of all kids. The 1910s saw the largest number of homesteads filed of any decade, and 1919 saw the last year in which farmers had economic parity with urban dwellers.
And then it collapsed.
The Farm Crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression
For farmers, the Depression really started in 1920, not 1929. Farms were failing, and yet homesteading, at a smaller post Great War rate, continued.
Then came 1929.
Still suffering from a post-war economic crisis, 1929 brought a flood of new homesteaders as desperate town and city dwellers left their homes, having lost their jobs, and sought to try to homestead, not knowing what they were doing. This was destroying the farm and ranch lands of the West. Finally, with Franklin Roosevelt's administration having come in, the Federal Government stepped in to save the situation by repealing the Homestead Acts and passing the Taylor Grazing Act.
The Taylor Grazing Act protected the existing farms and ranches against new homestead entrants, meaning that they could keep grazing that part of the Federal domain which they were, in exchange for a reasonable preferential lease. That's the system we've had ever since, and its what keeps real ranchers in business to this day, although here too times have caught up with the system and at least some farming states, like Iowa, have passed laws preventing absentee corporate ownership of farms. Wyoming should do the same, but wedded to a blind concept of property rights that doesn't meet the reality of our history or the situation, it hasn't and likely won't.
The Roosevelt farm policy went far beyond that. The Agricultural Adjustment Act dealt directly with prices, although it was ruled unconstitutional at the tail end of the Depression in 1936. Programs that resulted in some crops being "plowed under" took products off the market that were depressing prices, and price supports for landowners were put in place, which helped farmers in the West and North, but which were devastating to sharecroppers, who didn't own their own land, in the South.
And now today.
The net result of this, once again, is that the Republicans, by now the conservative party, were doing nothing for agriculture and would have let the occupants of the land go under. The Democrats, now the liberal party, saved them.
Since that time, it's been largely the same story, except not that much help has been needed. The Defense Wool Subsidy was passed in 1954, for defense wool needs, under the Eisenhower Administration, so there was an example of a Republican program that helped farmers, although it was designed to really do so, and it was eliminated in 1993 while Clinton was in office, so a Democrat operated to hurt sheep ranchers. This gets into the complicated story of subsidies, which are not as extensive as people imagine, and which have been part of a Federal "cheap food" policy that came in after World War Two and which is frankly a little spooky when looked at. Overall, the policy is unpopular with free marketers, who tend to be Republicans, but it's been kept in place with it sometimes being noted that the overall post-war history of "cheap food" is an historical anomaly. Anyhow, it gets a bit more complicated at this point.
Which takes us to this.
Looking at the history of it, Progressives and Liberals have kept ranchers and farmers on the land. When Harriet Hageman notes she's a fourth generation Wyomingite from an agricultural background, she's implying that she's a direct beneficiary of a massive government program that 1) removed the original occupants of the land to open it up to agriculture; 2) opened it up to the poorer agriculturalist and kept its hand on the scale to benefit them; and 3) operated to save them in times of economic distress.
Given that, it's been the Democrats that have really helped that sector since 1914, when they became the liberal party, and Republicans before that, when they were.
But that doesn't comport with the myth people have sold themselves very well.
There are lots of reasons not to be a Democrat. I'm not arguing that economic self-interest should dictate how a person votes, nor am I stating that the history of a party should control present votes.
But what I am stating is the current Agricultural loyalty to the GOP is misplaced based on its history. When a person states that they're fourth generation in agriculture, they're stating that they've benefitted from the Democratic Party, and really not so much from the Republicans. A lot of Republican loyalty is therefore based on something else, including a multi generational grudge against policies that saved them.
What else might be at work?
Footnotes
1. I don't know the circumstances of the Hageman's purchasing a ranch in 1961, but the date is interesting, as it would put this within a decade of the last era in which average ranchers in Wyoming could still buy land. This is almost impossible now, something that the current holders of family ranches often completely fail to appreciate.
It's also interesting in that Hageman, who is married but who retains her maiden name, doesn't work on the family farm/ranch, as Sen. Barrasso's accolade noted. She's followed the path of many younger sons, which of course she is not, in agriculture of entering into a profession as there really was no place else to go. This has been less true of women, who often marry into another agricultural family.
Hageman started off following an agricultural career, going to Casper College on a meat judging scholarship, something often oddly omitted in the biographies of her that I've seen, although it is occasionally noted.
1879 is a truly early Wyoming homestead entry.
2. In spite of all the criticism that various European colonist have received, it's worth noting that French and Spanish colonization was quite a bit different than English colonization.
French colonization particularly was. It was done on the cheap, for one thing, and almost all of the French colonist came from Normandy alone, bringing Norman culture, which was much more independent than English culture, with them. French colonist, like Spanish colonist, were also devoutly Roman Catholic, and it was emphasized in their faith that the natives were co-equal to them as human beings, endowed with the same rights before God. For this reason, French colonist mixed much more readily with the Natives than the English did.
This is true of the Spanish as well, who began to take Native brides (and mistresses) almost immediately upon contact. Spanish colonization is more complicated than the French example, however, as it was not done on the cheap and was part of a massive economic effort.
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