Wednesday, March 4, 1942. Counterstrikes

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1942: Two Japanese H8K flying boats bomb Pearl Harbor—no damage. Aircraft from USS Enterprise strike Marcus Island in South Pacific.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

If you were fighting the war, of course, it was a horrible day. . . if fighting was going on, which it was all over the world. But in terms of huge events, well, it was just another day in the war in some ways.

Operation K, the flying boat raid, had significant aspirations but was a flop.  It didn't do much, other than to remind everyone that Hawaii was still within Japanese air range.

H8K.  This one was in its last moments later in the war, just before the U.S. Navy, which took this photo, shot it down.

The round trip flight engaged in by the two Japanese aircraft from the Marshall Islands was nearly 5,000 miles in extent.

Marcus Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago and is extremely isolated.   The US bombed it repeatedly during 1942 and 1943, but never occupied it.

The remote island was first discovered by the Portuguese in 1694.  They didn't make a specific recordation of the location of the island, however, and it was not sighted again until British/Australian mariner Bourn Russell spotted it in 1830, noting that it was not on his charts, which of course it was not.  It was next sighted by an American evangelical mission to the Hawaiian islands in 1864. The first effort to occupy it commenced by a private Japanese expedition in 1886.

The United States and Japan both claimed the island early on, and in 1902 the US dispatched a warship to enforce its claims, but withdrew when it found the island occupied by the Japanese and a Japanese warship patrolling nearby.  The Japanese withdrew the civilian population in 1933 and made the island a military installation with a weather station and an airstrip.

The island was transferred to the United States in 1952, but in 1968 the US gave it back but continued to occupy it, having a substantial radio station there, whose antenna can be seen in the photo posted above from 1987.  The Coast Guard occupied the island until 1993, and then it was transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Force.

Blog Mirror: Leadville, Colorado

 Where my father's mother grew up.

Leadville, Colorado

Blog Mirror: Victor, Colorado

 Where my father's mother was born:

Victor, Colorado

The University of Wyoming, October 1908.

University of Wyoming.  October, 1908.

Wednesday November 2, 1921. Rise of the House of Saud

The Emirate of Jabal Shammar, whose territory would comprise at least 30% of modern Saudi Arabia at its height, surrendered to the British backed House of Saud and was incorporated into the Saudi kingdom, which was not yet referred to by that name.   The rise of the Rashidi state had resulted in the elimination of the Second Saudi State, which comprised over 40% of the current country.  It's defeat on this date in 1921 brought the Sauds very close to controlling the entire Arabian peninsula, although their borders did not yet include territories that are now within them.

Emir Abudull-azia muteb Al Rasheed who died in battle against the Saudis in 1906.

The story is complicated and long-running. The Rashidi Emirate was established in 1836 and had feuded with the Saud's from the onset, exiling them to Kuwait.  Constant strife between the ruling family and the Sauds was a permanent feature of its existence, and the emirate had begun to lose ground to the Sauds starting in 1902 as they fought to regain their territory.  The emirates position was both strengthened and imperiled by its decision to ally itself with the Turks, who were unpopular on the Arabian Peninsula, where as the British backed the Sauds for nearly inexplicable reasons. To make matters worse, the  House of Rashidi was incredibly unstable, with no established means of succession.

Following the sitting emir's death in battle in 1906, Mutail bin 'Abulazia succeeded is father but was assassinated by Sultan bin Hammud within a year. That figure then became emir but was unsuccessful in turning back the Saudis and was killed by his brothers in 1907.   Saʿūd bin Hammūd then became emir and lasted until 1910 when he was killed by relatives.  That lead to Saud bin Abdulaziz who ruled for ten years, from age ten until twenty, when he was assassinated by a cousin.  Only twenty at the time, he already had multiple wives.

Following his death,  ʿAbdullah bin Mutʿib ruled for a year as the 7th emir, surrendered to Ibn Saud on this date in 1921.  He, too, was only twenty years old at the time.

The story plays out violently, as we might suppose.  Upon the surrender the wife of one of the grandsons of the original emir, the grandson being Muhammad bin Talāl and his wife being Nura bin Sabhan married Prince Musa'id bin Abdulaziz Al Saud while  Talāl  was imprisoned.  The Prince was the twelth son of Ibn Saud.  The Prince and his wife became the parents of Prince Faisal bin Musa'id who murdered King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1975.  So in essence the murderer of King Faisal represented a union between the House of Saud and the Rasheeds.  The reasons for the Ameican educated Prince's actions have never been satisfactorily explained.

Saturday August 9, 1941. The Atlantic Charter Conference commences.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt commenced a secrete meeting at Placentia Bay at the U.S. Naval Station at Little Placentia Sound. The Navy's presence on the Newfoundland coast was already established even though this was prior to the American entry into the war.

HMS Prince of Wales, on which Winston Churchill had crossed the Atlantic for the meeting, and the USS McDougal which served to ferry the dignitaries to their respective ships.

This meeting would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter Meeting.

Permanently inhabited since 1671, the town of Placentia, founded as Plaisance, had a population of about 8,000 people in 1941, down from a high of 16,000 in 1900. The population at that time, 1941, was approximately the same as it had been in 1921, but it's since declined to less than half of that.  The decline in the cod fishing industry and the closure of the American base in 1970 provides the explanation for that.

Newfoundland was a British administered dominion at the time, not yet part of Canada.

On the same day, Charles Lindbergh gave a speech in Cleveland in which he accused those in favor of entering the war of plotting to create incidents that would draw the US into it.

Friday August 1, 1941. New things.

The United States Navy was about to get a brand new, and very advanced, torpedo bomber in the form of the Grumman TBF.

TBF's at the Natrona County International Airport as fire bombers in the 1960s.  These aircraft are an enduring memory of my childhood. According to a commenter on one of our companion blogs, these were removed from firefighting duties, which were a common post-war use of them, as the Forest Service was concerned over single engine aircraft being used in this role.  Ironically, the Air Tractor is a common firefighting aircraft today.

It was the first flight of the TBF.

It's interesting, in part because the U.S. Navy regarded the existing TBD-1 as obsolete, which by American standards it was, but it had only gone into service in 1935.  The TBD-1, obsolete though it may have been, was a more advanced aircraft than the Fairey Swordfish that had recently proven to be instrumental in the sinking of the Bismarck, even though the Sworfish had gone into service the following year, 1936.

Also of interest the Japanese already regarded the Nakajima B5N2, "Kate", which had gone into service in 1937 as obsolete, even though it was a more advanced aircraft than the TBD.  The B5N was slated for replacement by the new Nakajima B6N.  

All of this goes to show the technological race in the Pacific was significantly different from that in Europe.  The Japanese Navy was highly advanced, as was the U.S. Navy, and they were racing against each other for the most advanced aircraft and equipment in anticipation of the upcoming war.

On the same day, the U.S. Navy established a base at Midway Island in the Pacific and on Trinidad.

Midway, November 1941.

Midway isn't really a friendly location for humans and there was no permanent human presence on the tiny atoll until 1903, when it was first a station for a transpacific telegraph cable and then U.S. Marines, starting in 1908, when the cable company complained about an unauthorized Japanese presence on the island. An effort to dredge a path through the atoll for shipping purposes in the 1870s had previously failed.  In 1935, it became a stopover on the way to China for Pan American flying boats.  Pan American opened a hotel on the island as a result of the needed to service its wealthy customers on what was a luxury passage at the time.

The island remained a Naval station after World War Two and reached peak population in the 1960s. Since that time technological developments have rendered it obsolete as a base and there is no other reason for human habitation.  Its population has returned to 0.

You can read about those events here:

Today in World War II History—August 1, 1941

On the same day, the Jeep went into full production.

Grim wartime depiction by combat artist of the dead being transported by Jeep on Guadalcanal.

Jeep became the most famous U.S. military vehicle of all time, although it was not as important, in real terms, as the 6x6 series of military trucks.  Of note, while the Army's artillery branch had been working on 6x6 trucks since well before the war, being unable to find a suitable civilian truck, the famous military series really went into production in 1941 as well.

The Jeep dates back to a U.S. Army request for a 1/4 ton truck that was only a year old at the time.  The first suitable vehicle was produced by the Bantam company, which had a prewar history of making tiny vehicles and therefore was well suited to design one for the military.  Unfortunately for them, them, Bantam was not a large-scale manufacturer, so even though it came up with an excellent 1/4 truck, they really weren't capable of mass-producing it.

Because of these concerns, the Government provided the Bantam design to Willys and Ford, larger manufacturers.  This was common for defense contracts, with it being often the case that a product designed by one company would be produced by another.

Also common at this time was the technological development of a design once a company had it, and this rapidly occurred. Willys in particular improved on the Bantam truck and produced a new variant that rapidly became the standard one that Ford and Willys manufactured during the war.  Bantam did not produce any significant number of Jeeps, other than the very early ones, as a result.

The Jeep became a ubiquitous American military vehicle and indeed an iconic American 4x4.  Extremely dangerous and unstable in its early variants, it went into multiple roles.  It's sometimes claimed that it "replaced the horse", which at least in officer transportation it did, but the claim is over broad  Indeed, the widespread use of vehicles was sui generis, although there is some slight truth to that claim.

The wartime BRC40, MB and GPW Jeeps yielded to the M38 after the war, which was an extremely similar Jeep. At the same time, Willys introduced the CJ2, a civilian variant of its wartime MB.  The vehicle was a huge success but for some reason Willys itself, which had specialized in rugged vehicles, couldn't make a go of it in the post-war world specializing in them, and ultimately sold the Jeep product line.  The M38 itself yielded to the M38A1, which in civilian use became the familiar CJ5. Today, Chrysler owns the Jeep brand and produces an updated vehicle which is much safer than the prior variants, but which strongly resembles the CJ5.  The last military Jeep was the M151 "Mutt", which was not only highly dangerous, but which was a Ford design that was also manufactured by Kaiser (which also made CJ5s as a successor to Willys) and AMC (which also made CJ5s as a successor to Kaiser).

My first car, the incredibly dangerous M38A1.

As with the first item on this August 1, 1941, thread, I have a personal connection here as well.  I've owned three Jeeps over the years including a CJ2 and a M38A1.  I no longer have either for those first two vehicles, but I still own a 97 TJ.

Jeeps, I'd note, are so associated with the American military of World War Two that even movies made close in time to actual events, such as They Were Expendable, often mistakenly show them in use very early in the war.  In actuality, when World War Two broke out for the United States, the Jeep was so new that there were none of them in the Pacific Theater.

Roosevelt, on this day, restricted export sales of petroleum to the Western Hemisphere and the United Kingdom.  This followed up on recent actions aimed at Japan, but it also had the impact of securing petroleum supplies for the United Kingdom.

The Germans resumed civilian executions on Crete.

Mid Week At Work: Wood vendor and burros at Fort Marcy, with bakery on left, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Wood vendor and burros at Fort Marcy, with bakery on left, Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico

A fantastic photograph from 1905, and one truly from a bygone era.

This guy had a hard, very hard, job, and probably lived on the edge of poverty.  

On the other hand, he got to work outdoors, and with animals, two things deprived to the majority of people in the industrialized world today, a sort of poverty we endure.

Sunday, June 19, 1921. Sliver dollars.

While Sunday was an odd day in which to do it, the U.S. resumed minting silver dollars for the the first time since the 1904, with the pattern that was first minted being the Morgan pattern.  A  new pattern was introduced later in the year.

So, circling back to our focus, timewise, in 1916, when troops were being called up and deployed for the Punitive Expedition (was Lex Anteinternet: The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946). . .

what was the situation?

The law of the Officer's Club at Ft. Meyer, VA, being mowed by a mule drawn lawn mower.  This photo dates from early in the 20th Century at which time Congress had technically made the sale of alcohol illegal on Army bases, but at which point the Army chose to define beer and wine as not being excluded.

This follows from this post here:

Lex Anteinternet: 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...

Let me explain.

In 1982 when I was stationed as a recruit at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, there came a time when us boots could go to the 1-2-3 Club, a sort of combination cheap fast food/beer/high school hangout, type club.  It wasn't great, but if you had nowhere else to go, and we had nowhere else to go, it was okay*.  

The 1-2-3 Club had 3.2% beer, which I guess actually no longer is brewed by anyone, save perhaps by Guinness, as draft Guinness is only 3%.  Nobody brews it in the context of its earlier days, in which it was brewed in order to comply with certain laws. It's history goes back to 1933 as Prohibition was being repealed.  Prohibition never completely dried up the supply of legal alcohol, contrary to what people imagine it did.  Alcohol remained legal for "medicinal" purposes and extremely low alcohol beer, i.e., "Near Beer" was legal.  In 1933, prior to Prohibition being officially repealed, the legal alcohol limit for beer was increased up to 3.2%.  

Following the end of Prohibition, some states restricted beer sales based on the 3.2% amount, and Oklahoma was one of them.  Generally, if you were below a certain age you could buy 3.2%.  You couldn't buy beer with a higher alcohol content than that.  This was, of course before "Light Beer", which generally has around 4% ABV.  Coors, which is pretty light to start with, introduced Light Beer prior to World War Two, far earlier than many people might suppose, and relaunched it in 1978.  Millers Lite actually came out in 1967, prior to the Coors relaunch, but as Gablingers Diet Beer, a market name doomed to failure. The recipe was later sold to Millers.

I never really did grasp why Coors would market light beer.  Coors is pretty light to start with and there were already all those 3.2% beers around.  Oh well, my view obviously isn't the clever marketing one, as light beers became a pretty big deal.

Anyhow, in 1982 you could buy 3.2% beer at the 1-2-3 Club on Ft. Sill, or 3.2% beer downtown in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Obviously, Ft. Sill also had a NCO Club, or clubs, and an Officer's Club, or clubs.

Camp Guernsey had a NCO Club and an Officers Club as well.  Camp Humphreys, Korea had them as well and I had a nice bulgogi there for lunch while there.

I guess this is somewhat of a thing of the past now, to my surprise.  The Army has completely done away with Officers Clubs and now there are unitized clubs.  Privates can go to the same club that officers can, although 1-2-3 Clubs remain.  Without knowing for sure, I suspect that not only is the culture of such clubs now radically different, but probably a lot of more senior officers and NCOs rarely show up at the club.  This is part of the current culture in which we do not wish to recognize any differences at all in the social status of anyone, but frankly, I think this likely a mistake, although one reflecting the current military culture.   The current military is small compared to the giant Cold War Army that followed the giant World War Two Army, and its much more selective than its been at any prior point in history.  There are certainly problems in the current U.S. military, to be sure, but one current feature of it is that the up and out and selective nature of it means that the guys were sort of fit the definition of a "working man" that were sung about by Tennessee Ernie Ford aren't really in the service anymore.  That may have some negative aspects to it as well, but its a fact.  Anyhow, given the current make up of the currently fairly small army, the traditional separation in all things between enlisted men and officers has been much reduced and the clubs are gone.

So what was the situation in 1916?

Starting in 1890, about the time that the temperance movement was really gaining cultural steam, the Army banned the sale of hard alcohol at military posts that were located in areas that had Prohibition. So, for example, if you were stationed in a county that was dry, the Army post was as well, sort of.  The Army barred the sale only of hard alcohol, so beer and wine was still sold and you could still consume them at the post canteen.

In 1901, however, Congress entered the picture with the Canteen Act of 1901 which prohibited the sale of any intoxicating beverage including beer and wine.  This was pretty clearly intended to make all alcoholic beverages a thing of the past on post, but in practice the Army simply chose to define "intoxicating" beverages to mean those having a pretty stout alcohol content.  So, once again, no Kentucky bourbon on post, but beer was probably okay.  

This continued to be the practice up  until May 18, 1917, when the Selective Service Act stretched the military prohibition beyond the base to include a five mile alcohol exclusion zone and, moreover, it was made a crime to sell alcohol to a uniformed soldier anywhere.  Congress, recalling the end run the Army did with the 1901 act, defined "intoxicating" to be anything containing 1.4% alcohol or more, a very low threshold.

To complete the story, when Prohibition ended the 1901 statute remained in effect and the Army, at this point, continued to enforce the 1.4% limit.  Halfway through the Second World War, however, the Army changed this allowed 3.2%, the figure that had been created earlier when Prohibition was lifted.  This standard remained in place until 1953 when a legal ruling determined that the entire Canteen Act of 1901 had been repealed by the 1951 amendments to the Universal Military Training and Selective Service Act.

So, going back to our query about 1916, in 1916 a soldier stationed almost anywhere in the U.S. was probably able to buy beer at the post canteen.  Beyond the post fence, there would have undoubtedly been saloons catering to soldiers that sold everything.  The scene of a night of leave in 1941 Honolulu depicted in From Here To Eternity in that regard was likely pretty accurate on occasion.  And at that point, in some of the US, the "saloon trade" was unrestricted.  Having said that, in some locations Prohibition had already come in.

Footnotes

*There were other places to go, to be sure. Ft. Sill had a swimming pool open to privates, but I never went there.  The one time I had on base free time when we could have gone, I had a horrible case of progressing pneumonia and no interest in going to a pool.

I did once go to the library, as odd as that may seem, simply because I was sort of tired of the intellectual quality of my stay at Ft. Sill and because I hoped it to be quiet.  It was quiet, and very nice.  I looked like a fish out of water there, however, and I simultaneously froze and fell asleep there.  The freezing due to my having acclimated to the 100F+ Oklahoma summers and the sleep due to simply being exhausted. 

February 8, 1941. The passing of Willis Van Devanter.

 

Willis Van Devanter, the only Wyoming Supreme Court Justice (albeit only very briefly) to serve on the United States Supreme Court, died on this day in 1941.  He was living in Washington D. C. in retirement.

His early legal career is associated with Wyoming, and he had been a lawyer for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association during its more infamous period.  His time in Wyoming, however, during which he lived in Cheyenne, was brief.  It served him well, however, as he advanced rapidly in his career in part because this was something that could more readily occur in still frontier Wyoming.  Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals after he had served a stint as an attorney for the US, and Taft elevated him to the Supreme Court.  He'd been a judicial opponent of the New Deal.  He'd been retired for five years at the time of his death at age 80.

On the same day Bulgaria agreed to allow German troops to cross Bulgarian territory and German troops commenced their cross sea transit to Libya.

The British, on this day, incorporated Americans into their eves dropping activities at Bletchley Park.

More on what was going on in World War Two on this day:

Today in World War II History—February 8, 1941

A Conspiracy Thesis about Conspiracy Theorist. Qanon is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

There's been a lot that occurred since I started this thread, which wasn't very long ago.

I didn't really know anything about Qanon until after the recent drama.  It's hyper bizarre conspiracy theory is something that's so wacky, I frankly didn't pay much attention to it.  Still, I've now, over the last month, heard a couple of people spout off comments that clearly originate from it.  

You'd think that following the recent insurrection it'd be dead as a doornail.  Nope, it's most diehard adherents still think that President Trump is going to arrest Joe Biden and that the Democrats will turn out to be a child pornography ring or something. That's not going to happen, and people who believe that this point are in full blown self delusion. But there are people who meet that description.

So how on earth did this oddity get rolling?

I have a theory. . . 

And frankly, I think the source of all this nonsense is pretty obvious.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.  Which means that all of the people who are spouting its theories, in whole or in part, are dupes of Russian intelligence.

This is one of those topics where a little knowledge of history makes things pretty plain, but which also means that when you look around the world and what's going on, it's just baffling. Isn't this really obvious?  Well. . . of course it is, but you have to have a sense of history in order for that to be the case.

Okay, let's set out the evidence.

Russia has a long history of having one of the best deceptive services in the world.  Indeed, the playbook that's being played here has been played before.  Here's the cover of the first edition.

Eh?  You don't recognize volume one of the Qanon playbook?  Well more on that in a moment.

Imperial Russia had an extensive intelligence network.  It had to, as it was constantly faced with revolutionary movements that contested the idea that one man, the Czar, actually owned the entire country.  Indeed, the absurdity of that monarchical theory in the modern age is what gave rise to extreme counter movements.  Extremist governments produce extremist reactions.  To counter that, the crown needed secret policy.

When the Revolution came in 1917, its claimed that those policemen didn't transfer over to the new regime. Well, I'm skeptical.  The Red Army would have failed in the Civil War if some of the better Imperial Russian officers didn't throw in with the Reds.  It's not uncommon at all to find in biographies that so and so "had noble roots" even if serving the Communists.  I'm guessing that a lot of Ivan's and Igor's in the secret police went right into the Cheka.  

At any rate, and irrespective of whether that occurred or not, the Soviets certainly knew a lot about secret policing and spy craft as they'd been victims of it themselves.  There's the old phrase about how to "catch a thief". Well, in a lot of instances, the best spies are made up of people who spied on you. Turning spies is an ancient part of spycraft.

The Soviet Union developed the best deceptive spycraft set of skills in the world following the Civil War.  It's truly impressive.  Part of that involved disseminating propaganda and controlling or infiltrating institutions.  And part of that involved agents and sleeper agents.

It's well know that the Soviets had thousands of sleeper agents in the West.  The USSR only fell in 1990 and it isn't as if the new emerged Russia called them home.  They just stayed where they were, and as the KGB continued right on into service, under a new name, serving the new regime, the contacts largely just stayed there.  If you watch The Americans you might charmingly believe that the sleeper agents just became normal people when the USSR fell, but it almost certain did not.

Vladimir Putin was a loyal member of the KGB.

At any one point in history its' been difficult to tell what the goal of any Russian government is.  Russian is, as Churchill noted, "a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma".  A lot of the time, however, the goals of the Russian government are simply to be a menace to everyone else.  Russia has preserved a culture of political paranoia that is only matched by the one that Germany had prior to 1945.  Believing that everyone else is out to get them, they seek to disrupt everyone else.

Only a fool would believe that the KGB didn't have plans to massively disrupt Western governments by any means possible.  People like to imagine that means blowing things  up and the like, and no doubt those sorts of plans existed. But to get to that point would have been regarded as a Soviet foreign intelligence service failure.  Before ever getting there, influencing politics and disrupting political processes would have been resorted to. They probably in fact were more often than we might like to imagine.

Well, in actuality we don't have to imagine it to much, as we can read the Venona Files.

More on that in a moment.

Putin has stepped right into the role that Brezhnev and the like occupied in earlier eras.  He's not a Communist, apparently, but he's not a trustworthy nice guy either.  And its very clear that a principal go of his is to disrupt the US.

And the evidence is overwhelming he's doing it.

And Qanon is Russian work.

If it wasn't originally, and my guess is that it actually was, it is now.

Now the book above.

The book pictured above is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most anti Semitic lies ever perpetuated on the Earth. It came out of Imperial Russia prior to the Russo Japanese War and prior to the 1905 Revolution, and spread.  The best evidence is that it wasn't a product of the Imperial Russian secret service, but people have speculated about that in the past.  It certainly circulated in Russian circles before breaking out in the West.  Henry Ford paid to have copies made of it and to have them distributed.

The lies it tells about the Jews are lurid and absurd, but there are still people who believe them.

And here's the interesting part. . . those lies read a lot like what Qanon is putting out now.

Too much alike, in fact, for that to be mere coincidence.

While the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are absurd, the lesson the Russians would have learned about them is that distributing an absurdity in a free society works.  It worked with this racist tract from the early 20th Century, why wouldn't it work again.

Indeed, it's easier to distribute absurdities like this now, than it was in the early 20th Century. Then you had to find somebody to print them and distribute them.  Now all you have to do is to get it on the net.

And the Russians are proven masters of that.

And that's what's going on here.  Qanon is almost certainly one of the variety of Russian efforts designed to destabilize Western democracies.  It's likely an official effort of Russian state security, and it probably mostly comes out of troll farms within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire, but it likely also has some help in some ways from sleeper agents who where here before 1990 and still are.

So now, in 2021, this effort not only had some role in persuading some voters in the 2016 election (denying this is now acting contrary to the facts), but it set up the atmosphere for an insurrection last week.  And not only that, the theories have been tolerated to the point of near endorsement by the sitting President of the United States.  The country looks pathetic as a result.

So what can be done about this?

Well, something has to be done.  You'd think that after last week people would have woken up on this but there are plenty who have not.  This morning (January 11) in checking Twitter you can find that "Insurrection Act" is trending and that some now believe its been invoked and the world is going to be shocked by an arrest of Joe Biden on January 20, and that all the facts will come tumbling forth.

That's not going to happen.

The facts have come tumbling forth.  There's nothing there at all and a lot of people have been duped.  But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion duped a lot of people and there are still people who believe them.

Something definitely needs to be done, and right away.  Part of that involves prosecuting and holding to account those who set things up for last week, and that includes politicians who endorsed these things for their own cynically self serving reasons.  Some of the newly elected to Congress are so deluded as to probably believe the lies they've been telling, but very few are.  Being able to tell them and get away with it is not an option.

And something needs to be done about the underlying root cause of all of this, and quickly.

A modern democracy can't carry on with a large percentage of people believing in obvious deception, no matter what the source.

And the party's ultimately responsible need to be revealed, and soon.

The Venona files were compiled as early as the 1940s, but the government didn't release them until after 1990. There were reasons for that, but it did mean that many of the guilty escaped punishment for being complicit with Soviet espionage, and it further meant that for fifty years deceptive covers about some individuals who were involved with it were allowed to circulate.  I can't help but feel that the Federal Government knows a lot about Qanon right now.  We don't have the luxury of fifty years this time.  And efforts like this track back to somebody, or somebodies, and they need to pay some price for that.

A range breakfast. 1905

 

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Christ Reformed Presbyterian Church, Torrington Wyoming

Churches of the West: Christ Reformed Presbyterian Church, Torrington Wyoming:

Christ Reformed Presbyterian Church, Torrington Wyoming

This is the Christ Reformed Presbyterian Church in Torrington Wyoming.  The church was built in 1909.

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.

Churches of the West: St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.:

St. Peter's Catholic Church, Greeley Colorado.

This is St. Peter's Catholic Church in Greeley, Colorado.  The Gothic style church was built in 1909.  In addition to serving the residents of Greeley, it also serves the students of the University of Northern Colorado.

Cooking Tech. How things have changed in the kitchen over the past two. . . or maybe three, centuries.

We've been taking a look at cooking and stoves here recently, getting back to more of the roots of this blog and its purpose.  

Frankly, we'd been remiss in doing that.  It's one of those areas that we should have explored, and in fact we did a little, but we didn't know, what we didn't know.  Or at least we didn't know it very well.

Back on August 8, 2009 (yes, this blog has been around that long, and actually as there's a prior variant of it, even longer than that), I posted an item here entitled The Speed of Cooking.  I'm resetting it out here:

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

Early posts here, as you can see, tended to be short.

Now, since that time I've also posted a major thread here on the revolution in the home, that became a revolution in the workplace, in the form of the advance of domestic machery;  That thread, which Iv'e linked into numerous others, is here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Post have grown in length, as you can also see.

Anyhow, given all of this, the ways that cooking has changed over what really amounts to a relatively short time frame should have occured to me.  And it sort of did, as I noted in this "Maytag" entry:

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

But nonetheless, it didn't really occur to me that the cast iron stoves of early 20th Century, and late 19th, were an innovation in and of themselves, nor did I really think much about what cooking was like before that.

The recent A Hundred Years Ago thread on igniting a coal stove caused me to ponder this and take a look at what that was somewhat like.

Somebody already has, of course, and in this very interesting Internet article:

Foodways in 1910

I just linked this in recently to another post here.  One of the things that's interesting to me about it, in an odd sort of way, is that its on a website that's sponsored by a woodburning cookstove manufacturer.  Frankly, looking into this pretty much convinces me that I want nothing to do with wood, or coal, burning stoves, but anyway.

It did not occur to me, as part of that cast iron stoves of all types are really a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.  But of course, they'd have to be.  It's not like average people are going to cast their own stoves.  So how far back do they really go. Well, that article gives us a pretty good look at that, noting:.

Most American homes did not have stoves until well into the 19th century, so cooking was done in an open hearth, using heavy iron pots and pans suspended from iron hooks and bars or placed on three-legged trivets to lift them above the fires. Pots and pans were made mostly of heavy cast iron. Along with long-handled spatulas and spoons, most kitchens featured long-handled gridirons to broil meat and toasting forks to hold slices of bread.

Though some women used Dutch ovens and some had clay ovens built outside, until after the Civil War when stoves with ovens became more common, people ate pancakes more often than bread. Because bread was hard to bake at home, most towns had bakeries. Bread was often the only prepared food that could be bought in town

That's a different type of cooking entirely.

And a different style of eating, for that matter.

Or, for those who use a cast iron frying pan alot, maybe not.

Well, anyhow. . .

Because it isn't all that long ago, it's one that we know a fair amount about, historically, even if we don't think about it much.   And due to reenactors of one kind or another, and historical sites that are accurate, we also can observe ir or even experience it if we wish to.  And thanks to the excellent Townsends series of vlogs about the late 1700s in North America, we can view the topic if we wish to.  Indeed, they've done a comparison and contrast edition of Colonial v. Modern kitchens, which is well worth looking at:

The part of this that's the real shocker, in my view, is the heath.  I.e., fires on bricks right in a house.

It's another one of those things I never would have thought of.

The video mentions smoke, which must have been a constant feature of life before modern stoves.  I've already mentioned the smoke from wood and coal burning stoves, but smoke from a hearth would be right in the house.    Life must have been. . . smokey.

And more than a little dangerous.

Before we move on, on that, we'll have to note cast iron here.  I love cast iron and indeed one of the additional "pages" on this blog is devoted to it.

Cast iron has been around for a long time, of course, but I frankly don't really know how long.  I can find references to it in Asia going way, way back.  At least 2,000 years.  It shows up for the first time in English in 679, but that use didn't refer to a cooking vessel, but a vessel of another type.  By 1170, however, it was showing up in references to cooking vessels.  The Dutch Oven was actually patented in 1708, later than I would have thought, however. At any rate, they've been around for awhile, and in their modern form are highly associated with sand casting, something that was coming in during the 17th Century.

There was obviously cooking in vessels before cast iron, but as this isn't the complete history of cooking from antiquity until the present day.  For the history we're concerned with, cast iron was undoubtedly the default cookware.  Indeed, it's well worth noting that Dutch Ovens were one of the most popular trade items with Indian tribes.  People think of guns, but cast iron was really valuable and rapidly became the Indian cookware of choice once it was available.

Anyhow, the important thing here is up until the Industrial Revolution really took hold, people cooked with fire in ovens and on hearths.  The fuel source was, according to the Townsends, whom I trust to get it right, wood or sometimes charcoal.  That would impact the type of cooking you'd do, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as I imagined as cooking over wood or charcoal does leave you a lot of options.

Cast iron stoves seem to have come in during the 1830s, as industry began to really change the average American's daily life.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that everyone had them overnight. They were expensive and, frankly, wouldn't have fit the way the average person's house had been built at the time.  Still, they may have come in pretty rapidly.  Just imagine what a revolution in cooking and simply life they meant.  No more building fires on the floor, for one thing, and that's a pretty big thing.  A fire that was more reliable, contained, and safe is another.

By 1900 coal was the main fuel for stoves and every family had one.  That was a big change over a period of time of less than a century.  By 1930, however, gas was replacing coal as the fuel for stoves, and no wonder.  It was cleaner and it didn't involve the constant endless cleaning that a coal stove did.  And for the first time some sort of heavy smoke didn't have to be contended with.

It's really gas stoves that brought in modern cooking.  Gas sped up cooking, for one thing, and it sped up the decision making process for meals as well.  Without  having to bank the stove and build the fire, and all of that, cooking, which had been an all day process was reduced down to one that was much less time consuming.  Electric stoves, which started to come in about the same time, accomplished the same thing.  Still, during the 1940s 1/3 of Americans still cooked with coal or wood, probably a partial effect of the Great Depression which slowed the introduction of new technology.  

Now, of course, hardly anyone does.

The Big Picture. Nashville Terminal, 1905.

Nashville terminal, 1905

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Demetrius Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Church. Fairfield, North Dakota

Churches of the West: St. Demetrius Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Church. ...:

Monday, August 14, 2017

St. Demetrius Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Church. Fairfield, North Dakota

This is St. Demetrius Ukrainian Catholic Church which is outside of Fairfield, North Dakota.  The church is over a century old and gives testament to the enduring Ukrainian presence in the prairie states and provinces of the West.

This is one of several Ukrainian Catholic churches in western North Dakota and its the first Ukrainian Catholic Church to be featured here (a prior entry on the topic of the Ukrainian Catholic Church referenced a biritual priest then in Lander Wyoming.  People with a casual familairity with the Catholic Church tend to believe that all Catholic Churches are "Roman" Catholic, but this is far from true.

Just as Catholic as "Roman" (Latin Rite) Catholic Churches, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, to give it its full name, is one of a collection of Eastern Rite Catholic Churches.  The Catholic Church features three major groupings of Rites based on this initial early transmission of the faith. These are the Latin, Antiochian, Alexandrian and Byzantine, with the Byzantine having derived from the Antiochean.  All still survive in spite of the rift created by the Great Schism which caused separate churches that are not in communion with Rome, typically called "Orthodox" churches, to also come into existence which also descend from all but the Latin Rite.  From these four groups come something on the order of twenty three Rites, of which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is one.

The history of this particular Rite is not well known to me and it is difficult to fully know it without an in depth study.  This is part made confusing because it is one of the two major churches of the Ukraine, both of which use the Eastern Rite liturgical form, but only one of which is in communion with Rome.  The other major Ukrainian Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is an Eastern Orthodox Church (usually called "the Greek Church" by native Ukrainians) which is regarded as a self governing church by the Russian Orthodox Church, but only by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church has an ancient history dating back to the Christianization of the Ukraine itself.  Because of the Ukraine's close association with Russia there has always been some tension between its status and that of the Russian Orthodox Church and this was greatly increased during the life of the Soviet Union as the USSR suppressed and drove underground the Ukrainian Catholic Church while favoring the Russian Orthodox Church.  Today the Ukrainian Catholic Church is claimed to have the allegiance of a minority but growing percentage of the population of the Ukraine, at the expense of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but frankly telling what is what in regards to this history is difficult.

This church predates the establishment of the USSR, of course, and reflects a strong late 19th Century and early 20th Century Ukrainian migration to the prairie regions of North America.  Coming from a wheat growing region and stemming from a population of independent small farmers, Ukrainians were reestablishing that pattern of life on the North American prairie.  It's perhaps telling that so many Ukrainian Catholic Churches are present in this region, rather than Russian Orthodox, and that either says something about the populations that migrated or the allegiance of Ukrainians at that time.

The Ukrainians have proved to be enduring as a culture in North American in these regions, which these churches show.  In terms of their organizational structure, while fully Catholic (any Catholic is free to worship at any Catholic church, irrespective of Rite) they are subject to their own jurisdiction. Therefore, they are not part of the Diocese of Bismarck, but rather the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Saint Nicholas of Chicago, which covers over half of the United States and all of the western United States.

Indeed, in recent years the Ukrainian nature of this Eastern Rite church, together with the Slavic and Eastern nature of the second major Eastern Rite Catholic Church in the United States, the Byzantine Catholic Church (sometimes called the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church) have increased.  In the late 19th Century the Church in the United States had a Latinization policy in an attempt to unite all Catholics in North America more fully under the belief that this would help incorporate Catholics into society more ably, but this has been reversed.  At the present time the Catholic Church has sought to preserve the Eastern Rites wherever possible and this has lead to a de-Latinization process and a revival of practices that never diminished in Europe.