Monday, February 11, 1924. Booting Denby

The Senate began to move against Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby.

The vote was 47 to 34 to remove Denby, which would actually be something that Coolidge, not Congress, could do.

The Negro Sanhedrin, an attempt by the City of Chicago to have an all race congress to address racial issues, convened with representatives of trade unions, civic groups and fraternal organizations. The specific goal was to devise a program to protect the rights of African American tenant farmers.

Sunday, October 17, 1943. The Burma Railway completed.

The German surface raider Michel was torpedoed and sunk off of Japan by the USS Tarpon.  On the same day the German's lost the U-540, U-631 and U-841 in the Atlantic.

The Burma Railway, constructed with Asian slave labor and Allied POWs, was completed.

Tamils working on the bridge.

The railway may be best remembered today due to the fairly inaccurate movie, The Bridge On the River Kwai, which is nonetheless a great movie.

POW illustration of the construction of Bridge 227 across the Kwai.

A second concrete bridge replaced the original wooden bridge shortly after its construction. It was destroyed by the RAF in February 1945.  Shortly after the war, most of the original railway was dismantled and only the original 81 miles remains in use.

The Third Moscow Conference begins.

It would begin to work on the post-war world.

Chicago began running its subway for the first time.

Saturday, Sepember 22, 1923. Henning Hotel Robbed.

A major raid in Chicago on speakeasies resulted in the jails being filled to capacity.

Crime was a major story in Casper as well:

And the Governor of Oklahoma caught a dragon.

The Navy's ZR-1 dirigible flew over Washington, D. C.

Sunday, April 22, 1923. Agrarian rise.

The British commenced their occupation of Rawandiz, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish city is near the Turkish and Iranian borders.  The United Kingdom was occupying the country under a League of Nations Mandate.  The border was contested by the Turks, who had occupied the city only a year prior, which motivated the British to garrison the town.

The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union won the vast majority of the seats of the country's Parliament.  The agrarian party is the only such party to come to power by a majority of votes being cast for it outright.

The party was a founding member of the International Agrarian Bureau and part of a strong rising agrarian movement in Eastern Europe. The movement would eventually spread to Western Europe as well, but the rise of Communism and World War Two would effectively destroy it and its influence waned. The Bureau dissolved in 1971.

The Italian fascists cut 1B lire from the country's budget by cutting civil service jobs, leaving the deficit in the budget at 3B for that year.

A bomb exploded at Comiskey Park in Chicago, but didn't injure anyone.  Nobody was arrested from the explosion, but it was suspected that it was the result of the hiring of non-union labor to point the exterior of the ballpark.  

I don't know if it's related, but owner Charles Comiskey was notoriously cheap.

"Queen of the Pinups" Bettie Page was born on this day in 1923.  Page was a good student, but from a broken home.  After several attempts to get her feet on the ground she turned to modeling in her late 20s and rapidly became, by the early 1950s an infamous pornographic model and actress and one of the few individuals in that line of work whose name was well known.  In 1958, she experienced a radical conversion to Christianity, stopped her pornographic career, and devoted the rest of her life to her conversion, although she ended up marrying and divorcing three times in her life. Her divorces prevented her from being accepted in a new desired career of Christian missionary to Africa.  She was subpoenaed to testify in front of a Congressional committee at the time investigating the pornography industry at a time when there still remained sufficient public will to attempt to do something about it, an era that has now very much faded.

In making her switch, she dropped out of the public eye but oddly was subject to a large scale revival in interest in the 1980s, which is the only reason I've heard of her.  She was the subject of a major biography at the time, and I can recall reading a detailed review of it in The New Republic, which used to have fantastic book reviews.  In the intervening thirty years, all sorts of rumors had spring up about her, even though she remained alive at the time.  About as much as can reasonably be said is that she struggled with her mental health and had abandoned the life that brought her to a certain section of the public eye.  She shares that trait with many in the industry, including many Playboy models, which in fact she was one of.

Dying in 2008, Page is a sad tale of a very smart person whose early life slid into vice with grotesque and tragic results, but also one of recovery and redemption, if not full recovery.  It's interesting that the public focus was on her only when she was deep into depravity, and then again late in life when a pornified culture wanted to focus on her earlier image.

Of some interest, Page and Marilyn Monroe took the same path, at almost the same time, although Monroe's turn to modeling, including nude modeling, happened at a significantly earlier age.  Both women were the products of broken homes, although Monroe's was significantly more broken.  Monroe, moreover, was just a teenager when she was first a true model, and it was not until the late 1940s that she was photographed nude.  Ironically, Monroe was able to start a career in acting before the news of her nude photographs broke, and while she was Playboy's first (unwilling) model, she was able to escape the immediate implications of it due to the intervention of Life magazine, which ran the same photographs before Playboy as glamour photos in order to save her career.  Page, in contrast, began a rapid descent after first consenting to be photographed.  They were almost bookends in a certain story in the evolution of American morality and the portrayal of women.  Neither of them was able to really able to escape their early story, although Page certainly lived a much longer life.

Both of them would suggest that something about the Second World War and the culture that followed, including the release of false "studies" that the public was apparently willing to accept at the time had an impact on the culture, assuming that the war was merely conicidental in this story. That seems unlikely.

Friday, March 19, 1943. Ships lost, Airmen Promoted, Mobster departs.

The Carras (Greek), Glendalough (UK), Lulworth Hill (UK), and Matthew Luckenbach (US) went down in the Atlantic.   So did the U348, which was sunk by a British B-17.

Sarah Sundin notes, in her blog:

Today in World War II History—March 19, 1943: U-boats break off attacks on convoys HX-229 and SC-122, ending largest convoy battle of the war. 

The HMS Derwent, Ocean Voyager (UK) and Varvara went down in the Mediterranean.  

The U-5 went down in a diving accident off of Pilaue, East Prussia.  The Soviet TKA-35 collided with another torpedo boat and sank.

USS Wahoo.

The Japanese lost the Kowa Maru, Takachiho and Zogen Maru, all merchant ships, to two submarines. The USS Wahoo sank two of them.   She would be lost in December 1943.

The Japanese losses demonstrate that the Japanese were enduring in the Pacific what the Allies were in the Atlantic, shipping losses due to submarines.  However, the Japanese were never able to adjust to it to the extent that the Allies ultimately did.

Sundin also noted:

Today in World War II History—March 19, 1943: Henry H. Arnold is promoted to four-star general.

Arnold was a career airman and had in fact received flight instruction from the Wright Brothers.  A West Point graduate, he had wanted to be a cavalryman, but his initial assignment was to infantry.  He switched to aviation in 1911, but did not receive any sort of World War One overseas assignments, being used in other roles, much like Eisenhower, until 1918 at which time he became ill with Spanish Flu.  He arrived in Europe right at the time of the Armistice.

He became chief of the Air Corps in 1938.

56 at the time of this promotion, he was in ill health and starting in 1943 he would have the first of four severe wartime heart attacks which should have caused him to be required to leave the service, but he was allowed to stay due to intervention by President Roosevelt.

He was appointed to General of the Army in December 1944, and General of the Air Force, although retired in 1949.  He's the only person to have held five-star rank in the Air Force, and the only one to hold five star rank in two services.

He retired in 1947, before the establishment of the Air Force as a separate branch, and died at age 63 in 1950.

The Albanian Communist Party formed the Sigurimi which gathered intelligence in the fight for Albanian freedom, and then was used post-war to stamp out any chance of Albanian freedom.

Frank Nitti, cousin of and mobster with, Al Capone, died by suicide the day before a scheduled grand jury appearance.  

Nitti had risen high up in the Chicago mob due to Al Capone, although he was not exclusively active with it.  He did become a very significant member of it and was more than mere muscle, contrary to the way he has been portrayed in film.  Born in Italy, and raised in the US under rough circumstances, he was perhaps a natural for crime.

Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, Nitti and Capone were not in the mafia and were not eligable to be as they were not Sicilians or of Sicilian extraction.

Friday, August 25, 1922. Highest scoring baseball game ever.

The Cubs held off the Phillies 26-23 in Wrigley Field after being up by 19.  The game remains the highest-scoring game in major-league history.  Marty Callaghan of the Cubs batted three times in a single inning.

W. T. Cosgrave became Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, replacing Michael Collins in that role.

An earthquake occurred in the Tel Atlas region of Algeria.

Venerdì, 11 Agosto, 1922. Violenza

Ground was broken on Chicago's Soldier Field.

A Communist member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies declared that a recent general strike had failed as the proletariat was not sufficiently armed. This provoked a Fascists reaction during which fascist Francesco Giunta, who was armed, pulled out a revolver.  The session was suspended.

Umberto "the Ghost" Valenti, age 30, originally from Sicily, was shot and killed in a New York café under orders of the Genovese crime family.  Valenti, who was a hit man for the D'Aquila crime family, had killed a member of the Morello crime family removing the Camorra as a contender for the illegal liquor trade, but also meaning that competing Mafia crime families were now vying for that role.

Giuseppe Morello.  Probably completely unrelated, but while I was at the University of Wyoming, I twice had calculus classes taught by a graduate student with the last name Morello.  He was an excellent teacher.

This was part of a mob war with interesting aspects.  The Genovese family was part of the legendary "five families" of the New York mafia, but the Morello family was part of the Camorra.  Guiseepe Morello, the unfortunate victim of Valenti, was only recently out of prison at the time of his mob execution and the war turned to control of the former Comorrista's liquor business.  Valenti's murder, ordered by Giuseppe "Joe" Masseria, who had personally lured Valenti into the place of execution, settled the matter with the Genovese's coming out the victors.

Giuseppe "Joe" Masseria.  Masseria died in a hit ordered by Lucky Luciano in 1931.

Wednesday, December 7, 1921 Peace and Violence.

President Harding at Red Cross meeting.

On this day in 1921 King George V summoned parliament while President Eamon de Valera summoned his cabinet, both to approve the Anglo-Irish Treaty securing independence for Ireland as a dominion within the British Commonwealth.  Norther Ireland's Stormont was asked by its head, Sir James Craig, to delay action on the agreement.

A riot ensued in Chicago when police attempted arrest striking meatpackers.  360,000 people would become involved in the riot.

Farmers group meeting with President Harding at the White House.

September 2, 1920. Changing views.

Most of the time when I put a newspaper up here, it's to mark some big or at least interesting century old event.  Every now and then, however it's to comment on something and how it was perceived, which by extension comments on how we perceive things now.

I see around here fairly frequently stickers that say "Welcome to Wyoming--Consider everyone armed".  It's an amusing joke based on the fact that firearms are really common here.  That's been the case as long as I can personally recall, but it also refers to the fact that over the past two decades there's been a real boom in the concealed carry movement.  I've taken a look at that and its history in this old post here:

Packing Heat

Now, by mentioning this here, I don't mean to suggest that I'm opposed to these state laws allowing for concealed carry.  I'm not. But I do want to point out how carrying hasn't always been perceived the way it is now.

In 2020 we can take it for granted that the press is universally liberal, and indeed "progressive", unless we specifically know otherwise about a particular outlet.  In 1920, however, its a little more difficult to tell.  Papers were Democratic or Republican and generally weren't shy about noting it, but they were also pretty slavish followers of social trends, unless they were absolutely bucking them.   All of which makes the headline about Gerald Stack engaging in an act of "Slander" against Wyoming men interesting.

Under the same circumstances today, there aren't very many Wyoming men who would regard his comment as slanderous. Some would find it childish and inaccurate, and some on the political fringes would hold it up as a positive or negative example. But quite a few people would take some secret pride in the thought that everyone in the state was packing.

In 1920, however, Wyoming was seeking to overcome its frontier image even while preserving it. The Cheyenne newspaper knew that his comment wasn't true and pointed it out. Beyond that, they pointed it out as being slanderous. An insult, as it was, to the men of Wyoming.

Apparently it wasn't an insult to women, presumably because women weren't thought to be packing.

In actuality, quite a few people at the time, including quite a few people were packing and the ownership of pocket pistols was common.  Chicago, for its part, didn't have a gun control law addressing handguns until 1981, much later than most people would suppose, and it hasn't been a huge success by any measure.  Having said that, Illinois restricted the carrying of concealed handguns in 1949, following World War Two, at which time, contrary to our general myth, there was widespread national support for banning handguns.  New York City, in contrast, passed a firearms licensing act for concealable handguns in 1911, making the carrying of them without a license a felony.

Again, this isn't an argument for anything.  It's just an interesting look at how we often inaccurately imagine what the past was like.

On something completely different, Boy Scouts from Mansfield Ohio returned home after an epic multistate bicycle trip.

The Big Picture: Stockyards.

South Omaha, Nebraska.  1908.

Same stockyard, September 1916.

Omaha stockyards, 1914.

Kansas City, 1909

Kansas City, 1907.

Union stockyards, Chicago.  September 1907.

Union stockyards, Chicago.  1899.

Union stockyards, Atlanta Georgia.  January 2, 1909.

Related threads:

Friday Farming: Denver Stockyards, 1939.

April 5, 1920. Strife.

John D. Rockefeller photographed in Washington D.C. today where he spoke at the opening of the Interchurch movement campaign to raise a fund of $350000.

John D. Rockefeller was in Washington D.C. on this Easter Monday of 1920, speaking as part of an Interchurch effort to raise funds.

Group of Metlakahtlans (Native Alaskans), photographed on April 5, 1920. Note members of Salvation Army in this group.  They're native to the Southern Alaska and northern British Columbia region.

In southern Alaska, a group of Metakahtlan Pacific Coast natives was photographed, with some wearing the uniforms of the Salvation Army, which those individuals must have been members of.

Across the Pacific, the Japanese Army and the Russian Reds struggled for control of Vladivostok, with the Japanese prevailing.  And that was just one of the dramatic and violent events of the day.

Irish Republicans used the prior day to mark the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion in actions that saw a large number of British government establishments hit on the same day. 

Hit in the United States was rail service in Chicago, with railroad employees walking out on strike.

And France prepared to send her troops into the Ruhr as Germany, in an effort to suppress the Communist rebellion ongoing there, sparked by the Kapp Putsch, had sent its forces and the Freikorps into the region in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Closer to home, the sad fate of Mrs. Roy Bergstrom, 18 years old, who was shot and killed at the entry of her lawyer's office as she went to see him about a divorce from her husband of just five months, was headline news in Cheyenne.  It had been headline news in Laramie the day prior.

Mrs. Bergstrom's name was Carrie.  Roy Bergstrom had served in World War One and was convicted of her murder in October. His defense argued that he was insane but the jury found the opposite, but also found that he should be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than receive the death penalty.  Something must have occurred thereafter as he was sent to the state mental hospital as a prisoner in any event.  In 1922 his mother asked that he be pardoned, which was opposed by the prosecutor of his case.  He was not, but he was transferred to an asylum in Wisconsin, where he was from, with a provision that he be returned to Wyoming to serve his sentence should he later recover his sanity.

Will the bad news never cease?

Forget the impeachment, forget the imbroglio about Ukraine, forget Vladimir Putin scheming to make himself Russian Czar for eternity.

There's really serious bad news out there.

Taylor McGregor is leaving her position as a sports announcer for AT&T SportsNet in Colorado to take up one as a reporter for the Marquee Sports Network in Chicago, where she'll cover the Cubs.  She covered the Rockies in Colorado.

Will the tragedies never cease?

For those unfamiliar with McGregor, the tall blond sportscaster combined Kate Upton quality good looks (it's my blog. . . I can say that) with really excellent sports delivery.  Indeed, it was that delivery that makes her a great sportscaster. 

McGregor is one of Keli McGregor's daughters.  Keli McGregor was the president of the Rockies and died of a heart attack, due to an undetected viral infection, at age 48.  Taylor was 17 years old at the time.  Since that tragedy she went on to the University of Arkansas where, as in high school, she was a standout athlete in her own right.  At about the time of her graduation she was seeing baseball player Ty Hensley who was about to break out into the major leagues, but never really did.  Hensley plays with the Utica Unicorns now.

Hensley's star may have faded, although he's still achieved something I never will in actually being a professional baseball player, but Taylor's has risen.  After graduating she was located as a sportscaster in Casper Wyoming for awhile where it was obvious that she was headed for a lot more than broadcasting local sports.  Indeed, I've noted that before.

What a radical shift from not even all that long ago.  The other television channel, KTWO, was for some time the only local television station and its news department was a big deal when I was a kid.  Locals, for whatever reason, welcomed it when they got competition, but now they're back to being the only local broadcast station.  Both stations, for some time, have had the feeling to them of being training grounds for television news folks who are moving on to elsewhere, however, with those younger broadcasters being of varying qualities, sometimes great (like sportscaster Taylor McGregor who is now back in her native Denver and broadcasts particularly for the Rockies, at which she is excellent) and sometimes not so much.

I guess that gives Casper bragging rights really.  Just like we do over the small number or pro players from here or who played here at one time.

Sigh.

But watching Rockies baseball will never be the same.

January 1, 1920. New Year's Day. Revelry and Raids.

And so the violent 1910s had end and 1920, not yet roaring, was ushered in. . .ostensibly dry although efforts were already being made to evade Prohibition, both great and small, as the Chicago Tribune's Gasoline Alley made fun of.

January 1, 1920.  Gasoline Alley:  Happy New Years On Avery

On this day in Chicago undoubtedly sober agents conducted raids on suspected Reds in various gathering places they were known to frequent, arresting 200 people.  The same was conducted across the country under J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, with about 6,000 people being arrested as a result.

U.S. Attorney General Alexander Palmer.

November 22, 1919. Carlisle Missing, Labor having a party, Petroleum and its costs.

Those following the posts here recently (fewer in number now that the Great War and the drama associated with it are over, somewhat), have been reading about the quixotic flight of Wyoming train robber, Bill Carlisle and may be disappointed to not find him here again.  Well, the pursuit having fizzled, he was off the front page.  He was out there, hiding, or something, but posses headed for the Hole in the Wall or expecting another train robbery were disappointed, and therefore the local newspaper's readers were as well.  Instead, they read about the coal strike and increased tension with Mexico.

First national convention of the Labor Party, Chicago Ill.  November 22, 1919

In Chicago a new political party was meeting, the Labor Party of the United States. This back when third parties still had a chance of success.

This party wouldn't have much, as such.  It merged with another party in 1921 to become the Farmer Labor Party.  That party lasted until 1936 when a further merger created the Federated Farmer Labor Party, which became the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party at that time.  It lasted until 1944.

The populist party was a left wing populist social democratic party.  Three of its members occupied the Minnesota state house as governor from 1931 until 1939, showing it to be successful.  It also sent Congressmen to Washington every year from 1918 until 1942, save for one year.  One year it sent five Congressman back east.  Four Minnesota Senators were also members of the party or associated with it.  In 1944 it reorganized and became the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party which is affiliated with the Democratic Party, meaning that its relevance is minimal in real terms.  Democrats in Minnesotal are part of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party whether they know it or not, meaning that current Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar is a member of it.

"Block 818 from the west".  November 22, 1919.

Down in Texas more panoramic photos of big oil fields were being photographed.  

Elsewhere, the Gasoline Alley bunch was meeting and pondering the costs of transportation.

Thanksgiving Day, then as now, was coming right up.  On this Saturday The Literary Digest anticipated the holiday on its cover with a Rockwell illustration.  Thanksgiving day itself in 1919 was on November 27.

The Enigma of Western Writers.

This post is on Western writers.

By which I mean writers from the West who write about the West.  By the "West", I mean the West of the Mississippi United States in general, and the various regions of the West as well. 

I don't mean writers like Annie Proulx, who move into an area, write something that they set in the area, and then are celebrated by reviewers outside of the area who are completely ignorant on the area in the first place.  Or even ones like Sam Western.

Nothing was western about the originator of Western writing, Owen Wister, who was an East Coaster through and through.

I'm not saying, well not saying completely, that a person has to be born in one area to write knowledgeably about it. There are certainly examples to the contrary.  Cormac McCarthy has notably written about the west of Texas and in the Southern Gothic style, but he's from Rhode Island originally.  Owen Wister, who is sometimes credited with inventing the Western novel (and at the time he wrote The Virginian he was writing about the recent past) was very much an Easterner.  His friend Theodore Roosevelt wrote beautifully about the West of his day, but he was a new Yorker.  Frederic Remington, the legendary illustrator and painter, is not only famous for his Western paintings and illustrations, which dramatically capture an era, but he was a writer as well, writing on the same topics that he depicted in his paintings.   Edward Abbey was from Pennsylvania and didn't experience the West until he was 18 years old.  Thomas Berger who wrote the only really great novel about Indians, Little Big Man, lived on the East Coast his entire life.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a prolific reader and writer.

But I am saying that there's something different about writing on a culture that you are part of and about a region you are from.  I'd even go on to say that its really difficult to do that without being born in an area. Some writers can pull that off, but they are few.  So if you were born and raised in New England, or Zimbabwe, two actual examples for recent "Western writers", you can probably credibly pull off novels about the shipping news, or not going to the dogs tonight, but your regional novels aren't going to appear authentic to anyone from the region at all, because they are not.

Indeed, could Go Kill A Mockingbird have been written by anyone but a Southerner?  What about anything that Flannery O'Connor wrote. . . would they have been just as impactful if written by a Vermonter?   Would Doctor Zhivago have been what it was if it was written by a New Yorker?  Could Musashi have been written by anyone other than Ejii Yoshikawa?

I doubt it.

Boris Pasternak, who was born in Imperial Russia in 1890 and who died in the Soviet Union in 1960.  His famous work is the novel about the Russian doctor Zhivago, who would have been born right about the same time and and have experienced many of the same things.  Hardly anybody would maintain that a non Russian, let alone a non Russian who hadn't experienced these things, could have written a novel like Doctor Zhivago.

So I'm talking about writers who have spent their youth, even if not perhaps born here, in the real West.  Writers growing up, like Norman Maclean, in Montana, or writers growing up in Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, and so forth.  And writers, I will credit, from Texas.  Having said all of that, I'd currently exclude writers, for the most part, who may be from any of those regions but whose lives have been spent in the really big cities of the region, like Denver, Dallas or Houston. Big cities are their own thing, and that thing isn't the West.  Modern Denver, and indeed increasingly much of the Front Ranger for hundreds of miles around it, are no more The West than Newark is.  So too with Las Vegas, Phoenix, or any of the giant Texas cities.

Anyhow, some observations.

Western writers, as I've defined them, clearly have a deep, deep, love for the region.  If you read, for example, Norman Maclean's work, he clearly loved Montana.  Indeed, no other writer described the Rocky Mountain West as accurately and deeply as Maclean.  Nobody.

Mari Sandoz clearly loved Nebraska and the plains.  So did Willa Cather.

And what's so notable about that is that they all left the region they loved.

In the film A River Runs Through It and in the novella, Norman Maclean has his brother express the view that he, the brother, will "never leave Montana".  Indeed, Maclean has Paul, his brother, express the view that those who moved from Montana to the West Coast suffered from moral defects, a view a lot of Westerners do in fact have.  But both Paul Maclean and Norman Maclean, in real life, moved to Chicago. At the time that he wrote his works, late in life, Norman Maclean had spent more years in Chicago than in Montana.  He died in Chicago in 1990 at age 87 (his wife, Jessie, had a much shorter life, dying due to respiratory aliments in 1968 at age 63).

Mari Sandoz was born in Nebraska in 1896. She moved to Denver, which at that time remained a Western city, in 1940, at which time she was 44  years old, but then moved to New York City in 1943, where she remained until her death at age 69 in 1966.

Wila Cather, was born in 1873 and her family moved to Nebraska in 1883.  She was steeped in the West from her youth, but she moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, at which time she was an up and coming writer.  She moved to New York in 1905, which is where she remained for the rest of her life.

What's going on here?  It seems that "Western" writers don't achieve success at that unless they've moved to somewhere distinctly non Western.

Maybe some of that has to do with what Garrison Keillor, who is a Western writer (Minnesota and North Dakota are part of the West the way I've defined them) noted about the region in general.  Our number one export is our children.  While we often don't credit it, and we frequently argue about it, the West has both a small population and a good educational system.  We work hard here to educate our youth, but we really don't have anywhere for them to go, as a rule.  That's been noted by outsiders, such as non Westerner, Sam Western (who is in  the non Westerner import class of writer), but they rarely seem to grasp the nature of it.  The West remains the West, where it has, because of natural features which translate into economic ones.  This means that while we really appreciate the need for solid educations, it also means that we educate generation after generation of Westerners who have no place to go with their educations. So they go elsewhere.

That seems to me to be the story for Maclean and Cather.  Norman Maclean obtained a degree in English from Dartmouth in 1924. What use would that have been in the Montana of 1924, or for that matter in the Montana of 2019?  It'd be limited, at best.  He clearly retained his affection for Montana and spoke of himself, from his actual home in Chicago, as a Montanan in his writings.  He married a woman from Montana in 1931, showing the extent to which he retained actual roots there. But he lived and died in Chicago.

The situation for Cather was likely even more pronounced.  An educated woman in the West in the 1890s, her career options were necessarily  highly limited.  Indeed, they were limited in the Western world in general. She never married, something very unusual for her era, and focused on her writing career, but that would fairly obviously be a lot easier to do from New York than from Nebraska.

Sandoz doesn't quite fit this mold, but maybe she provides another example.  Sandoz was a difficult character from her youth on but first found herself published while living in Nebraska, having relocated to Lincoln from the Sand Hills. She's struggled up to that point to establish herself as a writer, but when she did, it was with two novels both of which met with gigantic disapproval in Nebraska.  So she moved to Denver, and then on to New York.

And perhaps Michael Punke gives us another example.  Punke is the author of The Revenant.  Punke was born in Torrington Wyoming.  He's a practicing lawyer, as well as an author (and therefore obviously a much more disciplined person than myself), but he has worked nearly exclusively outside of the West, both inside of and outside of government.

And maybe Punke's example brings home that this phenomenon is widespread with Westerners in general.  At what point you cease to be a Westerner by leaving a region can be debated.  I think it that does happen, and am one of the many who disregard lamentations published in the letters to the editor section of the newspapers that start off with "I read the article about so and so last week, and while I left Wyoming forty years ago. . . .". 

But it's clear that people who were largely raised in a region conceive of themselves, quite often, as remaining part of it their entire lives.  Which I suppose makes sense.  Wendell Berry has lamented that modern American life means that people don't become "of" a place, but maybe they do more than we might imagine (which is another reason that novelist from Zimbabwe or Vermont don't become regional authors by moving here).  Beyond that, however, what we see with writers may be nothing more than what we see with legions of Westerners.

For a long time, at least for rural Westerners, which is a definition that would fit many in the West, growing up and getting an education has meant either narrowing the scope of your education or leaving.  I.e., if you are educated as a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, school teacher, accountant, or engineer, you can find work here.  But if you have a PhD in English, you probably better be looking elsewhere.

Indeed, even with these other professions, as time marches on, this is becoming more and more true.  In 1990, at the time I graduated from the University of Wyoming's law school, it was already the case that maybe 1/3d of the class was headed to Colorado.  In some recent years over half the class has, as changes in the nature of practice have made that necessary.  Indeed, with the passage of the UBE, there's really no longer a reason for a Wyoming law school at all, and its only a matter of time until the legislature realizes that.

For some this is compounded with the American ethos of money meaning everything.  There are areas of various professions you can find work in the state, to be sure, but it won't pay the same lucrative amount that it might elsewhere.  So people move for the money.  Interestingly, they often find themselves in personal conflict after that, and are often among those writing to the editor with letters such as; "I'm distressed to read that such and so is going in near my beloved home town of Little Big Horn. . . I want it to be just like it was when I left in 1959 and I'm planning to return soon from the hideous dump of Los Angeles where I've been piling up cash since the early 1960s . . ." 

So, maybe it's the nature of the regional economy, and perhaps the national economy at that.  Writers gravitate to where the writers are, and the writers, by and large, are in the big cities.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them.

Maybe.

Maybe something else is also at work, and perhaps that's most notable in what we noted above about Mari Sandoz. She didn't leave Nebraska for more futile publishing grounds.  She left Nebraska as she was taking a lot of heat after getting published.  Indeed, her second novel was censored in the state.

So maybe its the classic example of a person not really being too welcome on their own home ground in some instances.

In fairness, Sandoz's writing was always very critical of various things, and indeed quite frankly her histories, for which she remains famous, aren't terribly accurate in various ways.  At least her histories haven't born the test of time except, perhaps, for Old Jules, the book her extraordinarily difficult father asked her to write about him after his passing.  But still, maybe the West doesn't welcome its own writers much?

Or maybe it does.  Novelist Jim Harrison, who was from Michigan, which is pretty rural in some locations and the near west to a degree, lived in Arizona and Montana after leaving Michigan.  Garrison Keillor, mentioned above, flirted with New York after already being well known, but returned to Minnesota.  Patrick McManus, the humor writer, lived in the West his entire life.  Current crime writer C. J. Box, whose protagonist is a Wyoming Game Warden, is from Wyoming.  Tim Sandlin, whom I've never read, was born in Oklahoma but lives in Jackson.

Indeed, if Oklahoma is sort of like Texas in some ways, it's worth noting that Texas has had a lot of native authors who have continued to live in Texas, Larry McMurtry notable among them.  McMurtry grew up on a ranch outside of Archer, Texas, a town so far north in Texas its nearly in Oklahoma.

So added to that, maybe these long distance travels aren't as far as they seem. . . in some instances.  In my grandfather's era Chicago was the hub of the western cattle industry and Denver just a very large city on the plains.  Chicago's role in that went away, but the point is that economists and politicians who are baffled by the fact that the West doesn't spawn very many large cities are potentially missing the point that it has. . . its just that everything is more spread out here.  So Chicago, a Midwestern city, may have more of a link to the West of an earlier era than we might suppose.  Denver serves that purpose for much of the Northern Plains now and, I dare say, Calgary does as well at a certain point.

Indeed, those cities filled that roles, or fill them, as they were, or are, centers of industry for regions.  And while we don't like to think of writing as an industry, it's a type of one, so perhaps some relocation makes sense.  Indeed, it might even now, in spite of the electronic age, which seems to be pulling the working population towards the city centers like a black hole draws in light.

Anyhow, something to ponder.

Labor Day, 1919

American troops near Marfa, Texas, are treated to a picnic in honor of Labor Day, September 1, 1919.

September 1 was Labor Day in 1919, then as now falling on the first Monday of September.  The unofficial end of American summer was a day off for most people, including I'd note most local newspapers, and it was celebrated in much the same fashion as it currently is.  Foot races and picnics were held in the mining town of Hanna, Wyoming.  Motorcycle races were held in Marion Indiana.  Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech on labor in Plymouth.

In the case of American solders serving on the border, which was still quite tense, this meant, if they were stationed near Marfa, a lunch served by the American Red Cross.

If they were assigned to the transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy, which was now running several days behind schedule, it wasn't a day off. They traveled from Carson City, Nevada, to Meyers, California

The road was treacherous and the Nevada Highway Department closed the road in the Sierras for the convoy.  Motorcycles were used to police the convoy speed and spacing, as well as looking for hot bearings.   The convoy went 34 miles in 13.5 hours and its arrival in Meyers was treated as a great success.  The Mayor of San Francisco traveled out to meet the convoy.

A party that claimed to represent labor was laboring away in chaos on this Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  The left wing turmoil going on in Chicago saw yet another Communist Party emerge out of the departed hardcore left wingers of the Socialist Party, when the non English speakers formed their own Communist Party of America.

This is really confusing as there already was a Communist Party of America, that had existed since May. This new one joined the old one rapidly. The English speaking Communist Labor Party would follow within months.

Of interest, the new foreign born Communist Party of America that formed on this day was double the size of the Socialist Party of America, with 60,000 members, and six times the size of the Communist Labor Party, which had 10,000 members.  This pretty shows that the leadership of the Socialist Party was more conservative and democratic than the rank and file, which had gone hardcore left. 

It also shows that the sentiments of the Socialist were highly influenced by immigrant members who were likely hardcore leftists when they arrived in the country, something that the Communist Party and its sympathizers on the radical left have not really liked to acknowledge.  The 1910s through the 1930s were the high water mark of radical Socialism in the US and its interesting to note that this was also the case for Anarchism, although it was waning by the 1930s.  In both instances the movements had significant immigrant representation within them and, moreover, representation from certain concentrated areas of Europe where the movements were also strong.  It's fairly clearly the case that in those instances they brought radical sentiments with them, rather than acquiring them in the US, although there were certainly native born radicals as well.

All of these movements were on the way out by the 1940s for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they'd been tested with disastrous results in Europe by that time and World War Two caused an economic boost in the country that buried any lingering sympathy for economic radicalism.  But in 1919, Communism was untested and on the rise, even if a language barrier caused it to oddly develop in the US, briefly, in a fractured fashion.  Even at that, however, it never really had very much appeal for most Americans, including foreign born ones, let alone most American workers.

Workers and the high cost of living were the topic of that day's Gasoline Alley, which was published in the local Chicago newspaper.  In a somewhat serious edition of the cartoon, the Reds made their own appearance that day.

It was a day off, of course, for most Americans and that meant not only picnics and races, but trips to the movies, which the movie industry used to introduce new films.

Her Purchase Price frankly had a the type of plot that movie goers of the era loved but which are creepy today.  In that film, Sir Derek Anstruther encounters European looking Egyptian slave Sheka while touring Egypt.  She learns that she's been raised a slave since taken by a bandit in her youth.  So he buys her, after falling in love with her.

Low and behold this disrupts Sir Anstruther's inheritance so the loyal Sheka sells herself to somebody else so that he's not dispossessed.  But Sir Derek pursues, and in the meantime her parentage is cleared up and all is well.

Hmmm. . . .

For folks who were bothered by the racial qualities of that one, let alone the moral questions raised by buying your bride in an Egyptian slave market, The Brat was also released on this day in 1919.  It featured a a chorus girl known only by that nickname who resists improper advances, resulting in her arrest.  The prosecutor's brother, however, is studying the underworld and therefore the judge lets her live in his household so that she can be the subject of study.  Well you can see how that one goes. . . 

Frankly, that was a bit disturbing as well.

Well, north of the border there was Back To God's Country, in which the daughter of a Canadian woodsman grows up in nature and has a rapport with animals.  She falls in love with a Canadian government official and marries him, after escaping the clutches of a bogus Mountie who attempts to rape her and who kills her father.  She then travels with her husband on a whaler but the captain turns out to be the rapist in disguise, so she has to escape by dog sled in the Arctic, with her husband.

Maybe it would have been better just to skip the movies on that Labor Day.