Reconsidering Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

This isn't the first time this has been done.  Earlier it was done as the criteria for receiving the medal changed and many pre World War One medals were downgraded.

to;

 

July 10, 1890.

Observations on a murder.

Earlier this week Robert Maher Jr., age 14, was murdered by Dominique Antonio Richard Harris, born in 2008, and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, born in 2009.  The killing seems to have been planned for several days prior to the assault in the Eastridge Mall that lead to Maher's death.  Plunkett did the actual killing, with Harris slamming Maher to the ground beforehand.  

The technical origin of the fight was that Maher had called Plunkett and Harris "freaks" during Spring Break (something that didn't exist when I was in school) and that enraged the two of them.  He called them that has they went into a porta potty at a local park together, which is odd, but insulting them wasn't very smart.  This raises the specter of the Matthew Shepherd killing, which had elements which never really seemed to be accurately reported.  More likely, however, in the exaggerated juvenile maleness of the rootless and (I'll bet) fatherless mid teenage boy, that was an implied insult that had to be addressed.

Maher never seems to have gotten in a single punch in the assault.  The two assailants, who had stolen their weapons along with Red Bulls and candy that day, acted in such a fashion that, whether Harris intended it or not, gave Plunkett the opportunity to viciously knife him.

There's no reason here, we'd note, to use the classic "alleged" assault language. The two teenage boys killed the third. They're going to be tried as adults. They ought o be put away, forever.

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

One thing that I saw soon after the murder was a comment by somebody on Facebook noting how they have moved from New Mexico, where their son had been knifed in a fight, to Casper under the belief that this was a quite safe town.

In another context, we've already spoken about immigrants into the state being delusional about it, and this is one such instance. Casper has never been a nice town.

Casper was founded in 1887, and it was violent from day one to some degree.  It was, however, originally a rial stop in cattle company, although it always had its eye on oil.  It was the jumping off spot for the invaders in the Johnson County War, which at least gives it a bit of a footnote in that violent event.  Casper's first murder occured on Saturday, September 20, 1890, when bartender John Conway shot and killed unarmed A. J. Tidwell, an FL Cattle Company cowboy in Lou Polk's dance house, following a round of fisticuffs.  The blood has been flowing ever since.

Casper really took a turn towards the wild side of life starting in World War One.  1917, as we've addressed here before, is when the Great War Oil boom really took off, and with it came a lot of men and a lot of vice. One of the things that created was Casper's infamous Sandbar district, in which prostitution was carried out openly and prohibition flaunted.  Repeated efforts to close it down utterly failed, until finally a 1970s vintage urban renewal project (yikes, the government taking a hand!") destroyed it.

With the booze and the prostitutes came murders (and no doubt disease) but it went on and on.  By and large, however, as odd as it may seem, people just acclimated themselves to it.  You got used to a town having a red-light district, and as there were some legitimate businesses in it, you'd go into it for legitimate reasons.  As a boy, we walked into the Sandbar in the early 70s to go to the War Surplus Store, which nobody seemed to think was a big deal. The America and Rialto movie theaters were just yards from the district, and the district's bars lapped up out of it into downtown Casper, with some of them being places were to walk around, rather than past, if at all possible.

Casper had quasi ethnic gangs when I was young, and at least in the schools that I attended, that was a factor of attending them.  You were careful about it.  It was impossible to get through junior high and high school without having been in a fight.  Most fights were hand to hand, but a teacher was knifed when I was in junior high breaking up a knife fight, so not all of them were.  In high school we all carried pocket knives and none of us were supposed to.  They were for protection.  While I was in high school, one of our classmates, who had been held back more than once, was killed outside a bar in a shooting, the result of a fight he provoked, which resulted in an ethnic riot at the school in which shots were fired.  The father of one of our classmates was killed by our classmate after he turned his molesting attention on her sister, having molested her for years.  Neither of these crimes resulted in prosecution.

The point is, for those who are shocked by the arrival of violence in Casper. . .well, it's been here since 1890.

The abandoned males

I keep waiting to hear the circumstances of the murderers' family lives and have not read any yet.  I'm sure it'll come out as the story advances.  While It's dangerous to speculate, there are reasons to suspect a few things, one being the killers likely had no fathers in the picture.   We're going to hear at some point that they were raised by their mothers, or in irregular homes.  I could of course be wrong, but I'll bet not.

Fatherless males are a major societal problem.  Fatherless males that are raised in an environment of sexual license are an even bigger problem.  Indeed, they're often fatherless for that reason in the first place, and they'll go on to spawn further fatherless children, who grow up in poverty and with little societal direction.  A minority will find that structure in the Old Law, the law before the law, which reaches back to tribalism in the extreme.  It's in the DNA.

The Old Law demanded death for transgressors too, something modern society has moved away from in large measure.  I've already heard it suggested that Harris and Plunkett should receive death, but due to their ages, I think that not very likely.  It'd be ill-advised, no matter what.  But tribalism spawns more tribalism.  The real personalities are lost of both the assailants and the victims.

I had always thought my grandfather on my mother's side died at age 58. . .

but it turns out, he died in 1958.

He was, therefore, about 67 years of age.

Still not ancient by current standards, but not 58 years of age, either.

That was, FWIW, the same year my parents married.

His wife, my grandmother, died at age 89, however, which is a little younger than I remembered.  It was in 1979, which is later than I remember, which means that my recollection didn't make mathematical sense, either.  I was in high school at the time, but I don't recall it that way.

That also means that she lived long enough to see one of her children die, which I knew, and two of them fall into severe illness accompanied by mental decline, which must have been hard in the extreme to endure.

Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.: 

Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Sgt. Toy receiving the Medal of Honor in 1891.  Sgt. Toy was cited for "bravery while shooting Indians" at Wounded Knee.  He is known to have shot two during the engagement, which is about all that his citations and the supporting material relates.

 Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Revoked.

While this isn't a Wyoming item per se, the Battle of Wounded Knee has been noted here before, as its a regional one.

It would likely surprise most readers here that twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers who participated in the actions at Wounded Knee.  The odd thing is that I was under the impression that the Army had rescinded these medals long ago, and I'm not completely certain that they haven't.  Having said that, I can't find that they were, so my presumption must have been in error.

To put this in context, the medals that were rescinded, if any were, weren't rescinded because Wounded Knee was a massacre.  They were rescinded because they didn't meet the post April 1917 criteria for receiving the award.

The Medal of Honor was first authorized in 1861 by the Navy, not the Army, following the retirement of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was adamantly opposed to the awarding of medals to servicemen, which he regarded as a European practice, not an American one.  The award was authorized by Congress that year, at the Navy's request.  The Army followed in 1862 in the same fashion.  The medals actually vary by appearance, to this day, depending upon which service issues them, and they've varied somewhat in design over time.

During the Civil War the award was generally issued for extraordinary heroism, but not necessarily of the same degree for which it is today.  Because of this, a fairly large number of Medals of Honor were conferred after the Civil War to servicemen who retroactively sought them, so awards continued for Civil War service for decades following the war.  New awards were also issued, of course, for acts of heroism in the remaining decades of the 19th Century, with Army awards usually being related to service in the Indian Wars.  Navy awards, in contrast, tended to be issued for heroic acts in lifesaving, a non combat issuance of the award that could not occur today.  Indeed, a fairly large number were issued to sailors who went over the sides of ships to save the lives, or attempt to, of drowning individuals, often with tragic results to the sailors.

At any rate, the period following the war and the method by which it was retroactively issued may have acclimated the Army to issuing awards as there are a surprising number of them that were issued for frontier battles.  This does not mean that there were not genuine acts of heroism that took place in those battles, it's just surprising how many there were and its clear that the criteria was substantially lower than that which would apply for most of the 20th Century.

Indeed, in the 20th Century the Army began to significantly tighten up requirements to hold the medal. This came into full fruition during World War One during which the Army made it plain that it was only a combat medal, while the Navy continued to issue the medal for peacetime heroism.  In 1917 the Army took the position that the medal could only be issued for combat acts of heroism at the risk of life to the recipient, and in 1918 that change became official.  Prior to the 1918 change the Army commissioned a review board on past issuance of the medal and struck 911 instances of them having been issued.  I'd thought the Wounded Knee medals had been stricken, but my presumption must be in error.

Frontier era Medals of Honor, as well as those issued to Civil War era soldiers after the Civil War, tend to be remarkably lacking in information as to why they were conferred.  This has presented a problem for the Army looking back on them in general.

Indeed, the Wounded Knee medals have this character.  They don't say much, and what they do say isn't all that useful to really know much about what lead them to be awarded.  There is a peculiar aspect to them, however, in that they don't reflect what we generally know about the battle historically.  

Wikipedia has summarized the twenty awards and what they were awarded for, and this illustrates this problem.  The Wounded Knee Wikipedia page summarizes this as follows

·         Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Joshua Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

·         Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

·         Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

·         Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy;

·         Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

·         First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

·         Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

·         Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

·         First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery;

·         Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

For quite a few of these, we're left without a clue as to what the basis of the award was, at least based on this summation. But for some, it would suggest a pitched real battle.  A couple of the awards are for rescuing wounded comrades under fire.  Others are for combat actions that we can recognize.

Indeed, one historian that I know, and probably only because I know him, has noted the citations in support for "it was a real battle", taking the controversial, albeit private, position that Wounded Knee was a real, pitched, engagement, not simply a slaughter.  This isn't the popular view at all, of course, and its frankly not all that well supported by the evidence either.  But what of that evidence.

A popular thesis that's sometimes presented is that Wounded Knee was the 7th Cavalry's revenge for the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Perhaps this is so, but if it is so, it's would be somewhat odd in that it would presume an institutional desire for revenge rather than a personal one, for the most part.  Wounded Knee was twenty four years after Little Big Horn and most of the men who had served at Little Big Horn were long since out of the service.  Indeed, some of the men who received awards would have been two young for service in 1890, and while I haven't looked up all of their biographies, some of them were not likely to have even been born at the time.  Maybe revenge was it, but if that's the case, it would demonstrate a 19th Century retention of institutional memories that vastly exceed the 20th and 21st Century ones.  Of course, the 7th Cavalry remains famous to this day for Little Big Horn, so perhaps that indeed is it.

Or perhaps what it reflects is that things went badly wrong at Wounded Knee and the massacre became a massively one sided battle featuring a slaughter, something that the Sioux on location would have been well within their rights to engage in. That is, once the things went wrong and the Army overreacted, as it certainly is well established that it did, the Sioux with recourse to arms would have been justified in acting in self defense.  That there were some actions in self defense which would have had the character of combat doesn't mean it wasn't combat.

And that raises the sticky moral issues of the Congressional efforts to rescind the medals.  Some of these medals are so poorly supported that the Army could likely simply rescind them on their own, as they have many others, and indeed, I thought they had.  Some seem quite unlikely to meet the modern criteria for the medal no matter what, and therefore under the practices established in 1917, they could be rescinded even if they were regarded as heroic at the time.  Cpl. Weinert's for example, unless there was more to it, would probably just merit a letter of commendation today.

Indeed, save for two examples that reference rescuing wounded comrades, I don't know that any of these would meet the modern criteria. They don't appear to.  So once again, most of these would appear to be subject to proper unilateral Army downgrading or rescission all on their own with no Congressional action.

But what of Congressional action, which has been proposed. The Army hasn't rescinded these awards and they certainly stand out as awards that should receive attention.  If Congress is to act, the best act likely would be to require the Army to review overall its pre 1917 awards once again.  If over 900 were weeded out the first time, at least a few would be today, and I suspect all of these would.

To simply rescind them, however, is problematic, as it will tend to be based neither on the criteria for award today, or the criteria of the award in 1890, but on the gigantic moral problem that is the Battle of Wounded Knee itself.  That is, these awards are proposed to be removed as we regard Wounded Knee as a genocidal act over all, which it does indeed appear to be.

The problem with that is that even if it is a genocidal act in chief, individual acts during it may or may not be. So, rushing forwards to rescue a wounded comrade might truly be heroic, even if done in the middle of an act of barbarism.  Other acts, such as simply shooting somebody, would seem to be participating in that barbarism, but here too you still have the situation of individual soldiers suddenly committed to action and not, in every instance, knowing what is going on.  It's now too late to know in most cases.  Were they acting like William Calley or just as a regular confused soldier?

Indeed, if medals can be stricken because we now abhor what they were fighting for (and in regard to Wounded Knee, it was questioned nearly immediately, which may be why the Army felt compelled to issue medals to those participating in it, to suggest it was a battle more than it was), what do we do with other problematic wars?

Eighty six men, for example, received the Medal of Honor for the Philippine Insurrection.  In retrospect, that was a pure colonial war we'd not condone in any fashion today, and it was controversial at the time.  Theodore Roosevelt very belatedly received the Medal of Honor for leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill during the Spanish American War, and he no doubt met the modern criterial, but the Spanish American War itself is morally dubious at best.  

Of course, none of these awards are associated with an act of genocide, which takes us back to Wounded Knee.  As noted above, maybe so many awards were issued there as the Army wanted to to convert a massacre into a battle, and conferring awards for bravery was a way to attempt to do that.

Certainly the number of awards for Wounded Knee is very outsized.  It's been noted that as many awards have been issued for heroism at Wounded Knee as have been for some gigantic Civil War battles.  Was the Army really more heroic at Wounded Knee than Antietam?  That seems unlikely.

Anyway a person looks at it, this is one of those topics that it seems clear would be best served by Army action.  The Army has looked at the topic of pre 1917 awards before, and it removed a fair number of them.  There's no reason that it can't do so again. It was regarded as harsh the last time it occurred, and some will complain now as well, but the Army simply did it last time.   That would honor the medal and acknowledge the history, and it really shouldn't be confined to just Wounded Knee.

Dead men and horses at Wounded Knee following the conflict.

January 10, 1921. History lost.

On this day in 1921, the Census of 1890 was badly damaged in a fire at the Commerce Department.  Not only did the fire consume records, but the resulting effort to fight it also did. And, moreover, the records were left in deep water overnight with open windows in a result to dry them back out.

The result of the 1920 election were quietly certified by Congress.

Oil was struck in Arkansas.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands D...: 

Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado.

This is the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church in the Old Highlands District of Denver, Colorado.  The church was built in 1890 and at the time it was built, it had no surrounding structures.  The Gothic style church is still a Methodist church today.

Blog Mirror: Bird’s Eye View of Sioux Camp at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 11/28/1890

 A remarkable and tragic image:

Bird’s Eye View of Sioux Camp at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 11/28/1890

Levis

Rancher, wearing blue jeans, in the early 1940s. The roll up cuff was extremely common at that time.

At the time I started this entry, I had just noted here a news story that every one in the US is well aware of, that being the supposed demise of Hostess and its most famous product, Twinkies.  I correctly noted in that entry that I thought the brand would be back, and was correct, but that's not the point of my entry here. Rather, this time I'll look at another major brand, which to my mind has declined over they years.  This time I'll mull over another famous brand name and product.

That product is Levis.  Or, more particularly, Levi-Strauss' signature product, the Levi's 501 jean.

In the popular imagination for those of a certain age, the Levi 501 has always been around. That's not really true, the jeans archetype actually took a real pounding in the late 1960s, when bell bottom jeans became inexplicably popular.  But they rebounded in the mid 1970s.  I can actually recall the exact moment when I knew that you could get them again here, locally.  I didn't like bell bottoms at all, but they were the only jeans you could get.  Walking one day in the hallway of the junior high I saw another student with the straight legged 501.  I went home that day and had my parents take me downtown and buy a pair.  That's probably the one and only time I ever had my parents go right out and get clothing for the reasons of "fashion.".  But I hated those bell bottoms and the 501s looked so much better.

Here, for example, is how the Levi Strauss company now conceives of those wearing its jeans, as featured on their website.  Most of these guys look like a stiff breeze would blow them over.  Heck, most of them look like they'd go running home crying due to stiff breeze and spend the rest of the day in bed watching the Lifetime Television network. What a pathetic state of affairs.  In some ways its pretty symbolic of what seems to have happened to the company, and maybe even a bit of American culture in general.

The Levis myth has the the birth of the company occurring when a California miner came in to Strauss' Sand Francisco shop and asked for a pair of trousers to be cut out of tent canvass, with Levi Strauss being that tent maker.  That's a nice myth, but it isn't really true.  Strauss operated the San Francisco branch of larger and more geographically spread mercantile firm, which sold a variety of things, including canvas and tents.  His San Francisco store was really part of a larger fine dry goods firm.  Stauss didn't really invent the iconic trousers either, but was approached Jacob Davis, a Latvian immigrant who was a tailor in the area. Davis, almost certainly not his real name, was continually buying canvas from Strauss and came up with the idea of making reinforced with rivets cotton trousers.  Davis and Strauss had another connection, although not too much can be made of it, as they were co-religious, both being immigrant who were Jewish.  Strauss, however, had been born in Bavaria, with Davis being born in Latvia. The cultural differences between the two were probably fairly pronounced.

But not so pronounced that they couldn't form a company for the new enterprise, which is what they did.  Davis was the actual patent holder, with the patent for the rivet reinforced trousers dating to 1873.  Knowing his market, the patent drafter depicted the design being worn by a miner.

Levi 501s appeared amazingly early, with the denim trousers being offered for the first time in 1890.  But, contrary to another widespread myth about them, they didn't become the trousers of the cowboy.  No cotton jean did.  Cotton jeans were the hard wear clothing of working men, engaged in heavy labor.  They appealed to the same set that buys Carhartts today.  Cowboys, in that era, wore wool trousers as a rule.  The highly accurate paintings of Remington and Russel are good illustrations of that, which if observed often shown cowboys wearing checked heavy wool trousers, or even in one instance NWMP wool breaches.

And Levi Strauss wasn't the only brand around offering blue denim trousers.  Prior to World War Two there were a variety of company's that manufactured them, with Lee, the manufacturer of Lee Rider's, being the biggest.  The brand that first popularized the idea that cowboys wore blue jeans was a brand oddly named Booger Reds, with those jeans being popular because their very dark blue color filmed well.  Levis were pretty much a West Coast item and were not well known elsewhere.

About the time that that movies started to depict cowboys as wearing jeans, the washing machine really came in, in earnest. That changed what people wore, particularly those who worked in heavy labor or dirty labor of any kind.  Before the washing machine cotton offered no advantages over wool, except that it was cooler in the summer.  By and large, the fabric people wore was wool.  The Army, a major consumer of cotton today, didn't even issue a cotton uniform for general wear until the 1930s, although it had long issued a cotton stable uniform strongly resembling modern Carhartts for quite some time prior to that.  But when washing machines came in, all that changed.  Cotton is easy to wash by machine.  Wool is not.

This is not to say that cotton wasn't worn at all.  It was, and obviously had been. Cotton was the major pre Civil War export item in the American South.  The growing and harvesting of cotton fueled slavery before the war, and the Southern states thought cotton so important, as a global commodity, that European nations would have no choice but to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.  In the odd way things go, the Southern succession actually caused the Egyptian cotton industry to boom, so cotton did not turn out to be the king that southerners believe it was, and in turn the British were more tied to Egypt, technically part of the Ottoman Empire, than ever.  Anyhow, that does demonstrate that cotton was from very early on an important textile plant, as with some other plants that can be sued for textile fibers.

Indeed "denim", the fabric that blue jeans came to be made of, had been around for eons prior to Levi Strauss ever making a pare of trousers.  While the first Levis were canvas, not denim, denim trousers had been around long enough to pick up that name from a French town which was associated with them.  They were a popular trouser with French sailors, and the French even made denim sails for ships.

And by the early 20th Century, and indeed well before that, cotton had become a popular cloth for shirts, and as we have seen, for the trousers of heavy labor. That doesn't diminish the importance of wool, which was huge, but it does show that cotton clothing of various types wasn't uncommon by any means.  Quite t he contrary.  Levis, on the other hand, weren't the only makers of blue jeans, and they weren't even the most common.

Between World War One and World War Two, blue jeans started to take off because of the introduction of the washing machine, crude and scary though they were, and the the movies.  With American households starting to turn to washing machines they started to turn more and more to cotton, although cotton didn't take over, overnight.  Cotton work clothing became increasingly common, as cotton was easy to wash.  Wool, however retained a hugely significant spot in clothing.  It remained the common cloth for most outerwear and mostly daily men's trousers, if they weren't working in some sort of dirty labor. 

Cowboying, however, is a type of dirty labor, and starting after World War One, cotton jeans came in, in a major way.  Jeans made good trousers for cowboys as they were relatively tight fitting (but not super tight, is in the Metro-sexual way Levis models now wear them)., they were relatively cheap, and they were easily washable.  That made them good clothing for ranchers and cowboys on the more modern pattern of ranch, which had fenced pastures and stable headquarters, where people generally returned to a house or bunkhouse every day.

Movies picked up on this right away, in part because a lot of early cowboy actors actually were cowboys. And jeans photographed well. The favorite jean for early movie makers was a brand called "Booger Reds", which were a deep blue, but Levis, a West Coast brand, show up as well.

Nationwide, however, Levis didn't dominate the market by any means. Probably the most common pattern of jeans, nationwide, were Lees.  Lees, like Levis, saw ranch use, and it was for that reason that Lee adopted the name Lee Riders for their jeans.  Prior to the Second World War Lee was the biggest manufacturer of jeans.

In addition to Lee, by the 1940s Levis already had a truly Ranch-centric competitor making a jean brand designed for ranch use in mind.  Lee was a fairly old company by the 1940s, but it already had a competitor in Casey Jones, a textile company which was already making a jean they sold under the name of Wranglers. Wranglers had wrangles in mind for the design, but Casey Jones didn't actually manufacture very many.  In the early 40s, however, Casey Jones was bought out by Blue Bell, a company that  manufactured overalls.  It acquired the Wrangler name, and in 1947 Blue Bell came out with the pattern of jeans still known as the 13MWZ, a pattern designed specifically for riders, and more specifically for rodeo riders.  

It was WWII that pushed Levis over the top as the dominant blue jean manufacturer.  It isn't as if nobody was making jeans going into the war, but Levis expanded enormous during the war.  Industrial work was the reason why.  So, perhaps ironically, a jean that was so commonly associated, early on, with cowboys in marking really expanded due to the industrial and heavy work during World War Two.

After the war, while it had competitors, Levis really took over as the dominant jean.  They remained, however, pretty strongly associated with physical work of one kind or another. By that time, people routinely believed that they'd always been the trousers of cowboys, which wasn't true, but they really were the trouser that most cowhands were wearing at that time.  For most people for everyday wear, however, assuming that they weren't in some physical labor, other trousers remained the norm. Wool remained pretty common in the 1950s, but cotton trousers had by that time come in pretty big as well. World War Two also caused that to occur as, while the Army was mostly clad in wool in Europe, every soldier had cotton khakis for stateside warm weather wear, and cotton combat uniforms had been introduced in varying patters in the Army everywhere.  Cotton "chinos", which were really simply the basic Army cotton khaki trouser, had come in.

In the 50s blue jeans busted out of the status of work only trousers when they became associated with rebellion. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin and others were all seen sporting them in films associated with 1950s rebellious youth. By the mid 1950s they were becoming the everyday wear for a generation. By the 1960s they'd completely taken over, with the Baby Boomer generation of the 1960s wearing bell bottom Levis for everything, and an older generation ahead of them wearing them a lot as well.  Colored (i.e., non blue) Levis came in as the cowboy stars of the 1930s and 40s had them made for color films of the 60s, expanding the myth that Levis were 19th Century cowboy clothing.  By the time I was in junior high and high school in the 70s and 80s, every boy wore Levis.  In the mid 70s, most girls did too, and indeed wore the same patterns as boys, except that they'd worn the new jeans into the bathtub and then out, until dry, to "shrink to fit" them to form.

So what happened to Levis?

Well, perhaps any company that becomes so dominant is bound to fall. But it is a surprising decline. By the 1970s Levis were so dominant that they'd become an item of smuggling into the Iron Curtain.  Levis were it.  Lee remained, but it had a mere fraction of the market it had once dominated.  Wranglers were there as well, but they were only worn by people who were strongly associated with agriculture, or, interestingly enough, by people who otherwise actually rode, reflecting the fact that their cut was designed for riders (white Wranglers are the trouser of professional polo players to this day).  Perhaps a market like that was doomed to be prey to students of marketing.

It came with women's jeans first.  By the late 1970s, designers were pitching new jean brands at women.  Calvin Klein comes to mind, but as pointed out in an emailed comment to a post on a companion blog of ours, locally young women turned to Rocky Mountain Jeans, a good brand pitched just at them.  Levis was slow to react, except that it started to expand into semi dress wear with "Dockers", a chino line of clothing probably reflecting that a lot of Boomers were no longer the rebels they once were.  Their market share declined.

And so, in my view, did their quality.  I still like Levis 501s and I still wear them today. But now that they're made overseas, they just aren't what they were. Sizing, for example, is inconsistent.  Wranglers are always the size they claim to be (and I wear them too).  Lees are more or less the same as they've always been. But Levis can be anything from big to small in the same sizing, and even the cloth isn't consistent. It's a sad decline of an iconic brand.

And their advertising is junk.  Rather than appealing to Hipsters, or whomever they're trying to appeal to, they'd be better off studying Wrangler whose wearers have brand loyalty.  Or perhaps they ought to study Harley Davidson, which also does.  Harley went through a rise and decline, only to recapture their market by remembering who bought them in the first place, and why.  Levis ought to ponder the same.