Saturday, March 29, 1924. Yesterday's news, or not. Morning mail.

 Well, it was the "Night Mail" edition.  You'd get it Saturday morning.

The local paper was a day behind on Daugherty, but only to the extent that you got this edition first thing in the morning, or in Saturday's morning mail.

Morning mail?

Yes, morning mail.  Mail was delivered twice per day until 1950.  It varied a bit by city, however, with some cities restricting that to businesses, and some covering everyone.  Some cities had business delivery more than once per day, with some delivering to businesses up to seven times per day. 

Twice per day home delivery ended on April 17, 1950.  For businesses, that ended in 1969.

The same issue had a tragic story of a love gone lethally wrong, and a shooting at the Lavoye.

The final addition, from the next day, followed up on that last story.

Last prior edition:

Friday, March 28, 1924. Daugherty resigns.

1920s, 1924, Calvin Coolidge, Petroleum, Teapot Dome Scandal

Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.

His points were really good.

Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern.  It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016.  Well, guess what, she has a right to do that.  You have a right to ignore it. 

She also expressed support for abortion being legal.  I feel it should be illegal.  That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.

But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out.  He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.

Indeed, they are.

Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club.  Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex.  Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.

Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed.  Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.

And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.

Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private.  It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues.  And we really don't need to.  But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper.  As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.

It's not that there's nothing to see here.  There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about.  They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do.  No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.

Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.

The Andy Griffith Show

I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun.  It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.

It's interesting. 

The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much.  It ran from 1960 to 1968.  It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964.  Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.

But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here.  The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago.  That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.

Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means.  But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers.  To some degree, that world view had returned.

Epilog

The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.

Saturday, July 24, 1943. The fall of Mussolini.

Lesser coat of arms of the Kingdom of Italy.

The Italian Fascist Grand Council voted 19 to 7 to remove Mussolini from power and restore full authority to the crown.

Dino Grandi, who had been a hard line fascist, but who also had opposed anti-Semitism and who had been critical of the war, organized beforehand Mussolini's downfall.  The Grand Council's statement following the decision read:

Grandi's Order of the Day

The Grand Council of Fascism,

meeting in these hours of utmost trial, turns all its thoughts to the heroic fighters in every corps who, side by side with the people of Sicily in whom shines the unequivocal faith of the Italian people, renewing the noble traditions of strenuous valor and the indomitable spirit of sacrifice of our glorious Armed Forces, having examined the internal and international situation and the war's political and military leadership,

proclaims

the sacred duty for all Italians to defend at all costs the homeland's unity, independence, and freedom, the fruits of sacrifice and the efforts of four generations from the Risorgimento to the present, the life and future of the Italian people;

affirms

the necessity of moral and material unity of all Italians in this serious and decisive hour for the nation's destiny;

declares

that to this end the immediate restoration of all state functions is necessary, assigning to the Crown, to the Grand Council, to the government, to the Parliament, and to the corporate groups the duties and responsibility established by our statutory and constitutional laws;

invites

the government to beseech His Majesty the king, to whom turns the loyal and trusting heart of the whole nation, to assume effective command of the Armed Forces of land, sea, and air for the honor and salvation of the homeland, under article 5 of the Constitution, the supreme initiative that our institutions assign to him, and which have always been throughout our nation's history the glorious heritage of our august House of Savoy.

Dino Grandi

While Mussolini seemed to accept the results at the time, he very quickly started acting as if they were not legally binding.

Mussolini had been in power for seventeen years, being the first of the fascist dictators to assume power.  While Italy's defeat in the field brought his end about, his removal did not automatically take the Italians out of the war.

Grandi would flea to Spain after the complete fascist collapse in August, not returning to Italy until 1960.  He died in 1988 at the age of 92.

Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force bombing campaign on Hamburg, began. Window was deployed for the first time.

Churches of the West: Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, Pinedale Wyoming

Churches of the West: Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, Pinedale Wyoming:

Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, Pinedale Wyoming

This is Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Pinedale, Wyoming.   Construction of the church commenced in November, 1959 (in the winter!) and was completed in 1960.  There are plans to renovate the church given the increase in parishioners over the years.

On Vietnam Veterans Day

Today is Vietnam Veterans Day.

The reason for that is that it was on this day, in 1973, that the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

As we now know, they were withdrawn under an agreement, the Paris Peace Accords, that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed would fail.  That Nixon believed that was cynically assumed, and it turns out correctly assumed, by the first historians of the war, who uniformly regarded the war as an ill though out American disaster. 

Starting about a decade ago, or so, however, revisionist histories, some fairly good and not so much, took the opposite approach.  A statistical analysis of the war conducted by a Marine veteran and expatriate living in Australia fairly convincingly argued that the war had been effectively won by 1968 and that the process of Vietnamization conducted by the Nixon Administration thereafter simply reflected that.  Two books on the early portion of the war when Diem was still the living autocrat in charge in the Republic of Vietnam took charitable views towards the pre 1965 American build up and argued that the war could have been won but for mistakes in that phase.

Then came Ken Burns groundbreaking recent documentary, followed by Max Hasting's new book on the war, which I'm only now just reading. 

Both make clear what the earlier books already had suggested.  The United States failed to appreciate the real situation in Vietnam from the onset, even while the French remained there, and the following intervention was beset by mistakes from the very first.  Worse yet, in some ways, Richard Nixon basically set out to betray the South Vietnam by extracting the United States dishonestly, believing that the North would ultimately prevail.  All that was needed, in his view, was some breathing room to make the departure decent.

Unfortunately for history, Nixon's other activities removed him from the Oval Office so that he was not present to bear the brunt of the impact of his decisions, which came in 1975 with the northern invasion.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in the face of that offensive, but in no small part due to a lack of effective air power.  Having been trained since at least the early 1960s to rely on massive American supplied firepower, without it, it really couldn't fight, and its troops rapidly lost spirit, to the extent they ever had any, and effectively quit.  Thousand and ultimately millions paid the price.

So are the pundits right, that the United States should have never gone in, in the first place?  I'm still not sure.  I find it hard to see a way that the U.S. could have avoided Vietnam, save perhaps for having denied the French any assistance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  That would have been the approach, to the extent that we can discern one, that Franklin Roosevelt would have taken, as he was universally opposed to colonialism and seems to have been fairly comfortable with independence movements that were heavily communist.  Of course, had Vietnam become a communist state in 1946, it's hard not to imagine that being the case all the way to at least Thailand.

Which is perhaps the point.  Earlier in this blog I posed the suggestion that the Vietnam War ought not to be looked at in a vacuum, but rather as a campaign, and not wholly successful one, in the Cold War.  And that still seems correct to me.

But one fought at great cost that the country has never really gotten over in some ways. 

Making this a good day to remember its veterans.

The 1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago. . .

on this day in that year.

It was to be a confrontational one, to say the least.

The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Invade Czechoslovakia. August 20, 1968.

Czechs with their flag walking past a burning Warsaw Pact tank. 

On this day in 1968 the Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia.

The action commenced very late in the day, at 11:00 p.m. to be precise, and featured an armored invasion by forces from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary.  The total combined Warsaw Pact forces totaled 500,000 troops, the same number of men that the United States committed to Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War.  It was not a small operation.

The Czechs had not prepared for the invasion and the government quickly called on its citizenry to not resist, a call that wasn't fully headed.  In part the Czechs were of the view that resistance was futile, which explains a lack of preparation, but they had also assumed that they would not be invaded by fellow Communist countries, a naive assumption.  Having said that, Romania, Yugoslavia an Albania refused to participate.  Indeed, the invasion was denounced by Romania on the day it occurred and Albania reacted by withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.

A Storm Starts in the Prague Spring. August 18, 1968.

 WARNING! Border Zone. Enter only on authorization.

It had been building for awhile, but on this date it became inevitable.  Leonid Brezhnev convened an meeting with his Warsaw Pack counterparts which made the invasion of Czechoslovakia inevitable.

We haven't really dealt with the Prague Spring much here, but this was one of those events of 1968 which would explode onto the news.  The term refers to a reform movement undertaken by the sitting Czechoslovakian government to liberalize and open up the nation in spite of its Communist rule.  In some ways, the movement prefigures what would happen in the later Polish Solidarity movement and the following Czech Velvet Revolution.

Czechoslovakia had never been an eager Communist nation and had fallen to Communism in what was effectively a slow motion coup immediately following World War Two, in 1948.  It had never been an enthusiastic Communist nation however and its indigenous Socialist party had a history of hostility towards the Soviet Union dating back to the Russian Civil War.  In 1968 it introduced a series of reforms that started opening the country up, moving it in a less authoritarian direction.  Indeed, it completely eliminated censorship of the press, a revolutionary move in any Communist country, and it had set in motion reforms designed to allow freedom of movement and refocus the economy on consumer goods.  It was fairly clearly moving in a direction that far departed from conventional Communism.

Czech Legion soldiers, mostly Socialist, near an armored train. The Czech Legion had fiercely fought their way across Russia in a bitter campaign against the Red Army in a successful effort to return to the fighting the Germans in 1918.

This caused the USSR grave concern.

And not without reason.

While little appreciated or understood in the West, Soviet Communism had never been anywhere near as stable as imagined and had struggled with forces dedicated to its elimination since day one.  In the USSR itself, armed resistance to the Communist carried on until the late 1920s, well after the Russian Civil War is generally imagined to have ceased.  During World War Two large numbers of Soviet citizens fought against the Reds and with, or allied to, the Germans for a variety of reasons.  That carried on inside the USSR in some quarters against hopeless odds into the late 1940s.

 German postage stamp commemorating the 1953 uprising against the Soviets.

The USSR had imposed Communism on the the Eastern European countries, as is well known, following World War Two.  But that too saw resistance.  In 1953 East Germans rose up against the Soviets, the first East Block rebellion against the USSR since the end of the war and perhaps ironically one which saw the defeated Germans take on the victorious Soviets.  It was of course put down.  In 1956 the Hungarians tried the same thing in a revolution that Hungarians naively hoped would see Western intervention.  So the Czechs were not unaware of the risks.

This was particularly so as leading into the late summer, the Soviets had sent various representatives to the Czechs to try to redirect them, without success.

The Green Berets. 1968. Unintentional Irony.

This is an awful movie, but it occurred to me the other day how unintentionally ironic the very end of this film is, and how laden with unknown foreshadowing.

The Ventures - Walk, Don't Run (1960) HQ

Is it just me, or is there something oddly compelling, and yet oddly disturbing, about this really old video clip of "Walk, Don't Run"?

Vintage Stepside

An early 1960s Ford 1/2 ton pickup truck with a stepside box.

Two wheel drive, with very small box.  Very common at the time. . . not so much anymore.

Intel, the semi conductor company, was founded

as NM Electronics by former Fairchild Semiconductor employees Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore on this day in 1968.

The rumblings of the computer revolution were beginning to be heard.

In Canada, the mailman wasn't being heard as the employees of Canada Post went on strike. For businesses near the US border this meant compensating by renting post office boxes in nearly by US locations.

Alexander Dubcek went on national Czech media to inform his people that he'd continue his democratic reforms as Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia in spite of pressure form the Soviet Union to stop it.

And Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil announced the discovery of oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, which the companies had made some months prior.

It was a busy day.