A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.

Today is Memorial Day.

I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:

Memorial Day

Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.

This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit.  At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor.  The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.

Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday.  In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War.  The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s.  The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two.  The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967.  In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.

The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years.  In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead.  This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent.  Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled.  This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.

Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide.  The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.

On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.

It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War.  That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.

Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way.  It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.

And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.

The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.

And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to.  Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.

Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them.  In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.

The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.  

We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will. 

Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents.  Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it.  The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.

Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies.  Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally.  I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.

The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way.  Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did.  The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution.  Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.

Much of the nation now does.

Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant.  When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists.  Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".

The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves.  The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area.  Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon.  Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.

This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form.  That's a different topic.  But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy.  Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.  

That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas.  In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).

All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not.  No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other.  Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.

That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.

Related threads:

Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.

Blog Mirror: The Cornerstone Speech

The Cornerstone Speech

Quite a remarkable blog entry.

It amazes me how even now some will argue that the South didn't attempt to leave over race based slavery.  

That's what it was all about.

Thursday, January 29, 1942. Iranian alliances, Integrated blood, Desert Island Discs.

Desert Island Discs premiered on the BBC. The show invited guests on to imagine that they were shipwrecked on a desert island, but could bring 8 records with them, then featuring the eight.

The show ran throughout the war, and has been revived from time to time.  The concept remains a popular one in the imagination.

Indeed, at least for the stressed, being shipwrecked on a desert island, as long as you have food and some comfort, starts to look like a pretty good thing. . . for a while.

As we learn from Sarah Sundin's blog; 

January 29, 1942: Iran signs treaty of alliance with Britain and USSR, which promise to depart Iran 6 months after Axis defeat.

Iran frankly didn't have much of a choice but to agree, and the Soviets would nearly have to be forced out after the war.

Persia had been long part of the "great game", along with Afghanistan, played between the United Kingdom and Russia.  As it was between the two, its position was untenable during the Second World War, and it was occupied, as we've previously discussed, by both powers.

The New York Times reported, on the previous days byline, that Prime Minister Churchill was standing for a vote of confidence:

LONDON, Jan. 28 -- Debate on conduct of the war raged in Parliament today with a political fury quite equal to the fighting on the fronts. At the end of one of the longest single day's sittings that Parliament has had since the war began, there was little doubt that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would get a big majority in a vote of confidence that will close the three-day debate.

He survived the vote.

African American enlisted men, white officer, 10th Cavalry, April 1942.

The NYT also reported that:

RED CROSS TO USE BLOOD OF NEGROES; New Policy, Formulated After Talks With Army and Navy, Is Hailed and Condemned WILL BE PROCESSED ALONE New York Delegation Criticizes Separation as 'Abhorrent' to Founding Principles

Hard to believe this was a concern with some people.

Blood is blood, but the "mixing of blood" to mean the mixing of "races" had been a long fear in a certain section of the United States, with no quarter of it being immune.  Laws existed nearly everywhere preventing mixed marriages, although the degree to which they were enforced varied enormously.

Scientifically, it was well known and had been for a very long time that there's no difference whatsoever between the blood of various humans, not matter what their ethnicity.  Indeed, the concept of "race" itself is a false one, although it's still widely believed.  The genetic variance between various human populations is slight, and to the extent it's real, it's real between various populations that are grouped into "races" as well.  I.e, there's a genetic variance, albeit slight, between, let's say, Irish men and Italians, and so on.

As we've discussed here before, it's widely stated, inaccurately, that World War Two brought about a phenomenal change in regard to women in the workplace, and hence society.  It'd be more accurate to say that about the status of African Americans in American society.

Their place, of course, had been fought over and struggled over since the end of the Civil War.  The Compromise of 1877 had caused a massive nationwide retreat in the cause of civil rights in the country, but the issue had not gone away.  The creation of the Lost Cause myth, its strong growth in the early 20th Century, and increased mobility, had brought about the Great Migration in the second decade of the 20th Century. World War One saw African Americans volunteer to fight in the belief that their performance in the war would bring about a final leap to full equality, but that not only did not occur, the end of the war brought a racist reaction with the Red Summer of 1919.

Still, things were slowly changing, and the liberal administration of Frankly Roosevelt at least held the promise of the advancement of civil rights for African Americans.

African Americans had served in some numbers in the U.S. military since the Revolution.  Interestingly, the Navy had been originally integrated, as we've also discussed here previously, but the Army had been segregated since large-scale recruiting of blacks first occurred during the Civil War.  The Marine Corps had not admitted blacks its entire history, going into the Second World War.  Given the excellent performance of black troops during World War One, it would be natural to suppose that the experiment would have been repeated during World War Two, but in fact the Army was, at least at first, more prejudiced during the Second World War than the First.

In spite of having longstanding all black combat units, prejudice from career officers, often with Southern roots, meant that the Army declined to deploy them as combat troops. For the most part, the Regular Army black units were busted up into service units during the war.  African American sailors likewise were relegated to service roles on board ship, something that had been the case since the steel wall Navy replaced the wooden wall one.  Blacks were allowed into the Marine Corps as the war progressed, but again in service roles.  Only late in the war, when pressure from African American groups and combat necessity required it, would this start to break down in the Army.

Still, the fact that the nation went to war espousing the ideal of equality made the hypocrisy a bit too much for society to bear.  Integration of the services would commence in the late 1940s and there was no going back.  This was brought about, in large part, due to the ideals expressed in the Second World War.

Related Threads:

Blacks in the Army. Segregation and Desegregation

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

 

Juneteenth. What the new Federal Holiday Commemorates

Today is a Federal Holiday.  And for the first time.

Emancipation Day celebration, Richmond Virginia, 1905.

The holiday is Juneteenth.

The creation of the holiday is certainly proof that the Federal Government can in fact act quickly.  The bills on this were very recently introduced and this just passed Congress earlier this week and was signed into law yesterday, giving Federal employees the day off today. On Monday, they weren't expecting a day off.

So what is it?

The day basically celebrates the end of slavery, but in a bit of an unusual way. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862.  Juneteenth, however, marks the calendar date of June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, after the end of the war, and issued proclamations voiding acts of the Texas legislature during the war and proclaiming the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.  His General Order No. 3 was read aloud in the streets. Hence, June 19 became recognized, regionally, as the day that the Emancipation Proclamation reached the most distant outposts of the slave states, bringing slavery finally to an end.

Band for Texas Emancipation Day celebration, 1900.

Celebration of the day in Texas started almost immediately, being first observed just one year later, by the state's freed African American population.  Interestingly, the day was generally known as Emancipation Day.  However, the revival of segregation in the South in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century caused the day to suffer a decline, until it began to be revived in the 1950s.  Upon revival, the name Juneteenth began to apply to it.  It was made a state holiday in Texas in 1979.  The day received recognition in 47 of the states since then, with North and South Dakota and Hawaii being the only ones that had not up until now.

Talk of making it a Federal holiday has existed at least since the 1980s.  Generally there's been very broad support for the move, but it obviously has taken years to accomplish, if we regard 1979 as the onset.  It's interestingly been an example of states largely being out in front of the Federal Government on a holiday, and not surprisingly the various ways that states have recognized it have not been consistent.

Gen. Gordon, who brought news to African Americans in Texas that they'd been freed two years prior.

There's been next to no opposition to the holiday being created which is interesting, in part, as the current times have been very oddly polarized in all sorts of ways.  The measure had bipartisan support, although fourteen Republican members of Congress voted against it.  One interestingly voted against it as he thought the official name confusing, Juneteenth National Independence Day, which in fact it somewhat is.  That individual wanted to use the original name, Emancipation Day, which is a view I somewhat sympathize with.

It'll be interesting to see what the public reaction is given that this happened seemingly so quickly.  By and large people who are aware of it seem pleased, although Candace Owens, the African American conservative columnists and quasi gadfly, predictably wasn't.  It'll probably be next year until there's widespread national recognition of the day.

In very real ways, what it commemorates is the suffering of one of the most American of all American demographics, the African Americans, who have been in the country since its founding, but who still were the victims of legal discrimination all the way into the 1960s and whose economic plight remains marked.

Juneteenth

This passed Congress earlier this week, and was signed into law today.  Unusually, the impact is truly immediate.

For those who might not know, Juneteenth commemorates the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaching Texas, which would have been the Confederacies most distant territorial assertion. 

Governor Gordon Responds to Federal Recognition of Juneteenth Holiday

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Today, President Biden signed a law creating a federal holiday recognizing Juneteenth. Governor Gordon has also signed a proclamation recognizing the significance of the day, which commemorates the end of slavery, while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Wyoming has recognized the Juneteenth holiday since 2003, when the state legislature passed a bill establishing the holiday on the third Saturday of the month.

Because of the President's action, Friday June 18, 2021 is a holiday for most federal employees per the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In Wyoming the Legislature has set State Holidays. While tomorrow will not be a state holiday, the Governor will work with lawmakers to consider this option for future years. 

“Freedom is always a cause for celebration and this is a momentous day in our nation’s history. I encourage people to observe this commemoration of the full enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, which embodies the values of all Americans,” Governor Gordon said.

--END--

May 21, 1921. Funeral of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White.

United States Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White's funeral was held on this day in 1921.

He was from Louisiana and had died two days earlier.  He was a surprise nomination to the Supreme Court by Grover Cleveland who had twice attempted to nominate New Yorkers before him.  

White was Jesuit educated and therefore not surprisingly a Catholic.  He's served in the Confederate forces during the Civil War, but in a capacity that's now hopelessly vague.  He was taken prisoner near the end of the war.  Due to his Confederate service, a statute in Washington D.C. was the subject of protests in August, 2020, even though very little is actually known about his wartime service.

Wonder Bread went on the market on this day in 1941.  Personally, I've never been really keen on it, but its an undoubted commercial success.

The American System

You know that you are listening to PBS News Hour when one of the commentators is enthusiastic about the Biden infrastructure proposal as he finds it comparable to the Whigs' American System economic policy.

Henry Clay, one of the founders of the Whig Party and the chief spokesman for its American System.

I had to look that up.

It turns out that I was slightly, and I do mean slightly, familiar with the American System, but not by that name and mostly in the form of its lingering influence on the GOP during the 1860s, 70s and 80s. And I really know nothing about Henry Clay, its chief proponent, other than that he was well known at the time. According to the Congressional website on such topics:

Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."

Clay delivered a famous speech on the topic, which we won't set out here as its of epic length. You can read it, however, here:  The American System.

The American System was the main economic platform of the Whigs and it was ardently, and now ironically, opposed by the Democrats.  The Democrats were pretty much a laissez-faire party at the time and opposed to government having much of any kid of role in the economy.

The Congressional summation of the American System doesn't appear to be a fair one. The breadth of Whig support for a government role in the economy was pretty wide.  For instance, it reached down to supporting public primary education, something that wasn't universal at the time.

It was ultimately the economic policies, and the overarching issue of slavery, that did the Whigs in, causing them to collapse in the 1850s. By that time the Southern faction of the party was no longer supportive of an expansive Federal role in the economy, where as the northern "National Republican" faction was.  Slavery, of course, became a massive issue in the party.  By the mid 1850s the party was flying apart and a collection of new parties rose up to contest for its former members.  In the north the Republican Party soon emerged.  In the South, Whigs remained without a structure, but opposed succession and then went on to loosely start to form an emerging party in the Southern Congress that never fully formed due to the war ending before that could occur.  The Confederacy was, of course, nearly a one party state.

People often discuss the legacy of the Whigs, but one early legacy was that the GOP was, initially, pretty proactive in using Federal money and Federal assets in the economy. The most prominent example of that was the Transcontinental Railroad which would not have come about without a degree of government planning, favoritism, spending and intervention.  So, PBS isn't out to a left wing lunch when its commentator makes this comparison.

It's interesting too, in that may in fact be a much closer analogy to what Biden is attempting to do than the New Deal.

That doesn't mean its a good idea, or that all of it is.  But it's a very interesting historical analogy.

The Infantry Company over a Century. Part 1. The Old Army becomes the Great War Army.

A note about this entry.  Like most of the items posted on this blog that pertain to the 1890-1920 time frame, this information was gathered and posted here as part of a research project for a novel.  As such, it's a post that invites comment.  I.e., the comments are research in and of themselves and its more than a little possible that there's material here that might be in need of correction.

Company C, Wyoming National Guard (Powell Wyoming), 1916.  Note that seemingly nearly everyone in this photograph is a rifleman.  Also of note is that these Wyoming National Guardsmen, all of whom would have come from the Park County area (and therefore were probably of a fairly uniform background and ethnicity) are using bedrolls like Frontier infantrymen, rather than the M1910 haversack that was official issue at the time.

Infantry, we’re often told, is the most basic of all Army roles.  Every soldiers starts off, to some extent, as a rifleman.  But save for those who have been in the infantry, which granted is a fair number of people over time, we may very well have an wholly inaccurate concept of how an infantry company, the basic maneuver element, is made up, and what individual infantrymen do today. 

And if that's true, we certainly don't have very good idea of how that came to be.

And we’re also unlikely to appreciate how it’s changed, and changed substantially, over time.

So, we’re going to go back to our period of focus and come forward to take a look at that in a series of posts that are relevant to military history, as well as the specific focus of this blog.

Prior to the Great War, the Old Army.

U.S. Infantry in Texas early in the 20th Century.  I'm not sure of the date, but its a 20th Century photograph dating after 1903 as all of the infantrymen are carrying M1903 rifles.  It's prior to 1915, however, in that they're all wearing late 19th Century pattern campaign hats of the type that came into service in the 1880s and remained until 1911.

Much of this blog has focused on the Punitive Expedition/Border War which ran up to and continued on into World War One.  As we've noted before, that event, the Punitive Expedition, was one in which the Army began to see the introduction of a lot of new weaponry.  While that expanded the Army's capabilities, it also, at the same time, presented problems on how exactly to handle the new equipment and how its use should be organized.

Historians are fond of saying that the Punitive Expedition served the purpose of mobilizing and organizing an Army that was in now way ready to engage in a giant European war, and that is certainly true.  But the fact of the matter remains the infantry that served along the Mexican border in 1916 (the troops who went into Mexico were largely cavalry) did not serve in an Army that was organizationally similar at all to the one that went to France in 1917.

American infantrymen became riflemen with the introduction of M1855 Rifle Musket.  Prior to that, the normal long arm for a U.S. infantryman was a musket, that being a smoothbore, and accordingly short range, weapon.  Rifles had been issued before but they were normally the weapon of specialists.  Starting in 1841, however, the Army began to make use of rifle muskets which had large bores and shallow rifling, combining the best features of the rifle and the musket and addressing the shortcomings of both.  The advantages were clear and the rifle musket rapidly supplanted the musket

Civil War era drawling showing a rifleman in a pose familiar to generations of combat riflemen up to the present day.

For a long time, prior to the Great War, infantry companies were comprised entirely or nearly entirely of riflemen, with their officers and NCO's often being issued sidearms rather than longarms, depending upon their position in the company. As with the period following 1917, companies were made up of platoons, and platoons were made up of squads, so that part of it is completely familiar.  Much of the rest of it would strike a modern soldier, indeed any soldier after 1917 as odd, although it wouldn't a civilian, given as civilians have been schooled by movies to continue to think of infantry this way.  Even in movies showing modern combat, most infantrymen are shown to be riflemen.

Squads at the time, that is prior to 1917, were formed by lining men in a company up and counting them out into groups of eight men per squad.  Each squad would have a corporal in charge of it and consist of eight men, including the commanding corporal.  The corporal, in terms of authority, and in reality, was equivalent to a sergeant in the Army post 1921.  I.e., the corporal was equivalent to a modern sergeant in the Army.  He was, we'd note, a true Non Commissioned Officer.

There were usually six squads per platoon.  The squads were organized into two sections, with each section being commanded by a sergeant.  The sergeant, in that instance, held a rank that would be equivalent to the modern Staff Sergeant, although his authority may be more comparable to that of a Sergeant First Class.

The platoon was commanded by a lieutenant. One of the company's two platoons was commanded by a 1st lieutenant, who was second in command of the company, and the other by a 2nd lieutenant.  The company was commanded by a Captain, who was aided by the company Field Sergeant, who was like a First Sergeant in terms of duties and authority.  The company staff consisted of the Field Sergeant, a Staff Sergeant and a private.  The Staff Sergeant's rank is only semi comparable to that of the current Staff Sergeant, but he did outrank "buck" Sergeants.

Sergeants were, rather obviously, a really big deal.

Spanish American War volunteers carrying .45-70 trapdoor Springfield single shot rifles and wearing blue wool uniforms.

While this structure would more or less exist going far back into the 19th Century, the Army had undergone a reorganization following the Spanish American War which brought to an end some of the remnants of of the Frontier Army in some ways and which pointed to the future, while at the same time much of the Army in 1910 would have remained perfectly recognizable to an old soldier, on the verge of retirement, who had entered it thirty years earlier in 1880.*  This was reflected by an overhaul of enlisted ranks in 1902 which brought in new classifications and which did away with old ones, and as part of that insignia which we can recognize today, for enlisted troops, over 100 years later.  Gone were the huge inverted stripes of the Frontier era and, replacing them, were much smaller insignia whose stripes pointed skyward. The new insignia, reflecting the arrival of smokeless powder which had caused the Army to start to emphasize concealment in uniforms for the first time, were not only much smaller, but they blended in. . .somewhat, with the uniform itself.

New York National Guardsmen boarding trains for border service during the Punitive Expedition.  They are still carrying their equipment in bed rolls rather than the M1910 Haversack.

The basic enlisted pattern of ranks that came into existence in 1902 continued on through 1921, when thing were much reorganized.  But the basic structure of the Rifle Company itself was about to change dramatically, in part due to advancements in small arms which were impacting the nearly universal identify of the infantryman as a rifleman.

Colorado National Guardsman with M1895 machinegun in 1914, at Ludlow Colorado.

Automatic weapons were coming into service, but how to use and issue them wasn't clear at first.  The U.S. Army first encountered them in the Spanish American War, which coincidentally overlapped with the Boer War which is where the British Army first encountered and used them.  The US adopted its first machinegun in 1895.  The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, which fought as dismounted cavalry in Cuba during the Spanish American War, used them in support of their assault of Kettle Hill, although theirs were privately purchased by unit supporters who had donated them to the unit.   The Spanish American and and Boer Wars proved their utility however and various models came after that.  They were, however, not assigned out at the squad level, but were retained in a separate company and assigned out by higher headquarters as needed.  There was, in other words, no organic automatic weapon at the company level, and certainly not at the squad level.

African American infantryman in 1898, carrying the then new Krag M1986 rifle.  This soldiers is wearing the blue service uniform which, at that time, was being phased out in favor of a khaki service uniform.  Most of the Army had not received the new uniform at this time and, in combat in  Cuba, most wore cotton duck stable clothing that was purchased for the war.  Some soldiers did deploy, however, with blue wool uniforms.  In the field, this soldier would have worn leggings, which he is not in this photograph.

There also weren't a lot of them.  Running up to World War One the Army issued new tables of organization for National Guard units, anticipating large formations such as divisions.  Even at that point, however, there were no automatic weapons at the company level at all.  The infantry regiment table provided for a Machine Gun Company which had a grand total of four automatic rifles. 

M1909 "Machine Rifle".  It was a variant of the Hotchkiss machinegun of the period and was acquired by the Army in very low quantities.

Just four.

Most men in a Rifle Company were just that, riflemen.  Automatic weapons were issued to special sections as noted.  Rifle grenadiers didn't exist.  Most of the infantry, therefore that served along the border with Mexico was leg infantry, carrying M1903 Springfield rifles, and of generally low rank.**

New York National Guardsmen in Texas during the Punitive Expedition.

That was about to change.

Well, some of it was about to change.  Some of it, not so much.

So, in 1916, anyhow, where we we at.  A company had about 100 men, commanded by a captain who had a very small staff.  The entire company, for that matter, had an economy of staff.  Most of the men were privates, almost all of which were riflemen, and most of who's direct authority figure, if you will, was a corporal. There were few sergeants in the company, and those who were there were pretty powerful men, in context.  There were some men around with special skills as well, such as buglers, farriers, and cooks.  Cooks were a specialty and the cook was an NCO himself, showing how important he was.  Even infantry had a small number of horses for officers and potentially for messengers, which is why there were farriers.  And automatic weapons had started to show up, but not as weapons assigned to the company itself, and not in large numbers.

A career soldier could expect himself, irrespective of the accuracy of the expectation, to spend his entire career in this sort of organization, and many men in fact had.  Some men spent entire careers as privates. Sergeants were men who had really advanced in the Army, even if they retired with only three stripes.  Corporals had achieved a measure of success.  Most of the men lived in common with each other in barracks.  Only NCO's might expect a measure of privacy.  Only sergeants might hope to marry.

Machine gun troops of the Punitive Expedition equipped with M1904 Maxim machinegun and carrying M1911 sidearms.

That, of course, was the Regular Army.  The National Guard was organized in the same fashion, but there was more variance in it.  Guardsmen volunteered for their own reasons and had no hope of retirement, as it wasn't available to them.  Some were well heeled, some were not, but they were largely armed and equipped in the same manner, although they received new material only after the Army had received a full measure of it first. Their uniforms and weapons could lag behind those of the Regular Army's.  And some units who had sponsors could be surprisingly well equipped, some having automatic weapons that were privately purchased for the unit and which did not fit into any sort of regular TO&E.

And then came the Great War.

Footnotes:

*Thirty years was the Army retirement period at the time.

**We've dealt with the weapons of the period separately, but in the 1900 to 1916 time frame, the Army adopted a new rifle to replace a nearly new rifle, with the M1903 replacing the M1896 Krag-Jorgensen, which was only seven years old at the time.  While M1896 rifles remained in service inventories up into World War Two, to some degree, is field replacement was amazingly rapid and by World War One there were no Regular Army or National Guard units carrying them.  

In terms of handguns, of which the US used a lot, in 1916 the Army was acquiring a newly adopted automatic pistol, the M1911.  Sizable quantities had been acquired but stocks of M1909 double action .45 revolvers remained in use. The M1909, for that matter, had been pushed into service due to the inadequacies of the M1892, which was chambered in .38.  The M1892 had proven so inadequate in combat that old stocks of .45 M1873 revolvers were issued for field use until M1909s were adopted and fielded.  Given this confusion, and rapid replacement of one revolver by another in 1916, there weren't enough M1911s around, and some soldiers went into Mexico with M1909s.

Related threads:

The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition.

Resolution from the House of Representatives to President of the United States, 1/10/1866

 

2020 Election Post Mortem Part X. What do you do with an act of sedition, and who has committed it, and how can the country get over it.

The flag of treason.  It's been flying everywhere.

Sedition.

We've been seeing a lot of it, in a lot of places, and by people who should, and frankly do, know better, those people seeing the citizens of the United States as ignorant dupes.

What exactly, you may wonder, is sedition?  Well, under the current law, it is defined as follows:

18 U.S § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

So, the elements are:

1.  Two ore more people who;

2.  Conspire to:

• overthrow; or
• put down; or
• destroy by force.

the Government of the United States; or

• to levy war against it;
• or oppose by force the the authority thereof
• or by force prevent, hinder or delay

the execution of the law; or

• by force seize, take or possess any property of the United States contrary to law.

There's no question that the Insurrection of January 6, 2021 was sedition by those who participated in it.  They are guilty of a lot of other things as well, but sedition is one of them.

But what about the political leader, the President of the United States, who urged them into the act?

Well, let's consider he not only did that, but he also made a telephone call, with his confederates, trying to pressure Georgia officials into throwing the election for him.

Sedition?

Well, I suppose it depends on what he meant.  During his impeachment trial it was maintained that things he said in his telephone call with the leader of the Ukraine could have meant more than one thing.  Perhaps that's the case here as well.  But a jury could decide either way here. . . and not just on the statements, but also by the collective acts of pressuring and then urging here and there.

And what about local leaders who backed this farce.  The GOP in more than one location, through its state organizations, has been backing the fantasy that the President won the election.  Is that sedition?  Probably not.  But its not very honorable.

But going further, what about legislators who know, or should know better, and who argue that Senators and Congressmen who are not going along with this should be brought before the state legislator to be held into account. Sedition?  No, but again, distressing.*

And this all matters enormously.

Twice in this country's history the nation has let those who committed grave offenses against the democracy of the nation get away with it; once following the Civil War when it did not try the guilty and punish them under the law, and once in the 1970s when an effort to steal an election through actual theft was covered up by the person it was intended to benefit.**  In both of those instances a national act of mercy was misbegotten and lead to further crimes and errors.  The Reagan administration barely got away with unlawful arms sales, for example.  And now Donald Trump has tried to steal an election, wrecked the conservatives party he belongs to, and put the nation in a state of insurrection.

This time, the guilty must be punished. The act is too brazen, the crime too great, and the implications too vast not to do so.  An insurrection has happened. The capitol has been vandalized for the first time since the War of 1812, when at least it was the British, not rebellious Americans, who did it.*** If we do not, we will pay for it as a nation.

So, the first thing that must be done is to try the insurrectionist.  The penalty is clear, and they should get the full measure of the law.

And those seditionist otherwise involved in this sorry scene should pay as well, including Donald Trump.  The soul of the nation depends on it, and the future of the Republican Party.  Republicans should demand it.  And immediately.

And those politicians urging fantasies upon the people, both great and small? Well, they can't be tried, but it's lawful not to seat them.  

Urging an illegal overthrowal of the elected head of state simply because you disagree with him, and deluding others into the idea that the election was tainted, is the end state of democracies.  Not addressing it puts us on the path trod by Mexico in 1910, Russia in 1917,Germany in 1932, and Italy and Spain prior to that.  The choices are stark but the lessons of the failure to act are clear.

Choices have consequences, including bad and deluded ones.  Unfortunately, they have consequences for everyone, not just the person making them.

________________________________________________________________________________

*What about sinful?  At least one of the individuals doing this is my co-religious. Telling lies can be a pretty serious sin from the Catholic prospective. A public official telling them must not only confess his sins, but arguably must rectify the misdeed to the extent he can, which would be a public recanting of his statement.

This assumes knowledge, of course.  A person can't seriously sin if they don't know what they're doing is sinful, from the Catholic prospective. But blinding yourself to the truth may be a factor, perhaps.

And what about the pulpit.  If there's a parishioner in the pews telling lies is there a pastoral duty to correct?  Maybe.

**And in this act of Richard Nixon, it might be noted, there was the irony that his campaign had no need to do this.  Therefore, just as Donald Trump has thrown his party under the bus needless, so had Richard Nixon.

***The Capitol was not even touched during the Civil War, although mostly because the rebellious Southern states didn't have the capacity to do it.

Blog Mirror: The Supreme Court and the president’s pardon power

Supreme Court blogger Amy Howe takes a look at a topic that's been coming up a lot recently, that being the President's power to pardon.  She looks at it from the prospective of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court and the president’s pardon power

The article addresses the topic of whether the President can pardon himself, as he can pardon others for crimes they're not actually convicted of.  My feeling is that he cannot, although as noted, it's an undecided legal issue.

Going out from there and into the controversial, the only existing Presidential pardon of a former President, Gerald Ford's pardon of President Nixon, is in my view one of the great American blunders of the 20th Century, or perhaps in our entire history.  Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his role in covering up the Watergate break-in.  His conviction and sentencing would have stood as an example that Presidents aren't above the law, which Nixon famously stated in an interview that they were.  HIs pardoning suggested that in fact they were, no matter what Ford's intent was.

To go to the really controversial, I feel the same way about figures from the Confederacy who would have been logically subject to criminal charges for their role in rebelling against the United States.  By this I'm not suggesting that they should have tried men down to the enlisted ranks, or even all of the officers.  But they should have tried the principal political figures like Jefferson Davis.  They should also have tried U.S. Army officers who abandoned their commissions to serve in the Confederate forces.  

That's a harsh, Radical Republican (in the terms of the day) view, but that would have chastised a South that was ready to cooperate with the Federal government and it would have kept the Southern aristocracy from regaining control of the region.  It would have put us decades ahead in achieving a more equitable society as well.  It was an opportunity lost.

Indeed, both acts of mercy were opportunities lost, with the merciful forgetting that there really are no "chapters in history".  It's one long book.

Sowing the wind.

It has long been part of the American political canon that what George Washington did for the country should be and must be repeated by his Oval Office successors.

Washington served two terms as the first President under the Constitution.  As he approached the end of his second there was serious debate in some quarters on whether he would step down and out, run again, or just declare himself to be the chief administrator of the country.

He simply retired and went back to public life.

No American President broke that tradition until Franklin Roosevelt kept running, ultimately dying in office.  Controversial at the time, it lead to the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting that.  But Roosevelt's presence in the office was democratic, not judicial.

Now President Trump has shattered that tradition, refusing to concede that he has lost when he did, and resorting to crackpot litigation.  Lawyers who are deeply in Trump's camp have signed on for the effort, including the Attorney General of Texas and Ted Cruz, who offered to argue the Pennsylvania appeal at the Supreme Court level if it got in the door. . . as if that was really supposed to achieve something.* The Republican Party has generally gone along with this.

The real thing that separates democracies from dictatorship is the democratic habit.  That's about it.  Lots of dictators started out as elected officials and then retained office by refusing to step down, manipulating the organs of power in order to make their retention of power appear legitimate.  It's extremely common.

Here the US judicial system has been put a stress test and really held up. The Republican Party has been put to one and has not.  Real questions remain going forward what this will end up causing.

Back in 2016 when Trump secured the GOP nomination I commented here that the GOP would have to live with the implications.  It will, and now the question really is, is there a GOP?  The party has certainly changed from what it was four years ago, and one of the things that has developed is a scary section of belief that the leader's word must be true because he is the leader. Added to that is the additional element that power must be retained as the opponent is unworthy of power, or even traitorous.

That crosses over a political line from supporting democracy to something akin to what fascist parties believed.  At their core they believed that only they were worthy of rule as their opponents were evil.  Indeed that outlook caused a debate in the 1930s on whether or not Communist parties were fascist parties, as that was in essence their belief as well.  It's not that the Soviet Union didn't have elections, it always did.  It's that only the "right" votes counted.

Added to that you can only stress things so many times before they bend.  Due to the disfunction of the American Federal Government since the 1990s the Courts have increasingly become an unelected national legislature.  Chief Justice Roberts complained about this openly in an oral argument just the other day.  Now the Courts are all that is keeping an attempted coup through the courts from succeeding. They're doing a magnificent job of it, but how many times can they keep doing that, and will it now be the case that every one of our national elections is legislated this way.  

If the latter is the case, we're now a second or even third rate nation, protected only by the overabundance of lawyers in our society.  That's a scary situation to be in.

We really don't know where this will lead over the next two to four years.  My suspicion is that the Trump banner will rapidly fade and with it will come a restructuring of the GOP back to a more Buckleyesque part.  If not, it'll split in two into a center right party and an alt right part, neither of which will be able to contend against the largest party in the nation, the Democratic Party.  

"they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind"

The sad thing is that this is pretty conclusive evidence that there is something extremely fractured in American society.  It'd be too early to consign the country to the grave in terms of it being a first rate nation, but the US is fooling itself it believes that there's a quick fix to this.  Donald Trump promised to "make American great again", and he has some economic advances to his credit.  But the political damage now done to the country won't be repaired in four years, eight years, or twelve.  His legacy will be principally defined by an effort to illegitimately hold on to power, just like Richard Nixon's long and distinguished career is defined almost wholly by Watergate.

The country did get over Watergate, of course, although in real ways the reaction to Watergate and what it brought into the nation's politics is responsible for what we're seeing now.  It's certain, retrospectively, that Gerald Ford is partially responsible for what is happening now by his pardoning of Nixon, something that never should have been done.  Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his crimes so as to set a standard and example for the future.

Indeed, Nixon's pardoning is one of the two great American pardoning political mistakes that continues to haunt the nation, the first being the United States decision to decline prosecuting the treasonous Southern figures who lead the rebelling against the country in 1860 to 65.  Just as Washington's peaceful transfer of power set an example that lasted over 200 years, the post Civil War  and post Watergate examples set a precedent that you really can attack the institutions of the country and get away with it.  Trying the Southern rebels for treason would have shocked the Southern population into reform, which they were already inclined towards, in 1865 and have kept their antebellum masters from returning to rule over white and black alike once again.  Trying Nixon would have proved that the President wasn't above the law even when sitting behind the Resolute Desk.  Instead we made heroes out of traitors in the first instance and inserted the concept of near dictatorial powers while in office in the second.  Indeed Nixon openly opined that the President couldn't commit a crime.

But the President can and in a loose non judicial sense a crime against the American political culture is being committed right now and shows ever sense of running right up to the inauguration.  The Atlantic magazine has turned out to be prophetic in what Trump intended to try.  For the most part only the courts, and some brave state Republican officials, have kept this from occurring.  If it had succeeded the result would have been complete anarchy.

Some commentators, at this point in time, have begun to ponder if what is presently occurring goes further than that, however.  It might be a real crime, they're stating, with that crime being sedition.

Sedition, in Federal law, is as follows:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

As can be seen, the elements require two or more people, making it a species of conspiracy, who conspire to overthrow the government or "to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States".  

There's been commentary that this must be an attempt to violently overthrow or hinder, but that's not really clear.  Law is not only in the details, but also in the grammar.  It's perfectly possible to read 18 USC § 2394 to prevent conspiracies to 1) overthrow, or 2) put down, or "destroy by force". That doesn't require the conspiracies to overthrow, put down, or  hinder to require force.

Of course, that question is academic as nobody is going to charge Trump or his confederates with sedition.  And if they did, they'd fail, contrary to what some commentators have argued, as the effort has been pretty open and doesn't look like any sort of conventional conspiracy so much as a rather odd litigation based strategy.  The point, however, is that by sow the winds of the court, the doors are now open to what that may reap.  Some on the left are now openly advocating for trying Trump for something.  

By and large, that would be disastrous for the left unless something really dramatic comes forward post election, which some are speculating will.  That, they argue, is Trump's real reason for trying to hold on to power. The evidence doesn't support that, however.  It appears just to be an effort to hold on to power combined with a disrespect for the American democratic tradition.

Disrespect, of course, won't take a person anywhere without support and it seems pretty clear that the last time a crisis of this type, Watergate, existed neither the public nor the Republican Party were willing to participate in it. Of course, in that case an outright crime had occurred.  Still, being old enough to remember 1973, I can remember Nixon being held in contempt by average people for what he did.

Here we are seeing something else.  People are signing up to be part of this effort.  And that points to something just as troubling.

It wasn't in 2016 that the nation suddenly had a disgruntled populist segment of the country that was voting to light the match to the nation.  That impulse went all the way back to the latter part of Ronald Reagan's administration in the figure of such people as Newt Gingrich.  Starting in the 1970s the blue collar, rust belt, section of the nation began to suffer a decline which nobody made any effort to reverse.  At the same time the American left went from begin a WASP based sort of Episcopal left to an increasingly Hight Ashbury sort of left that had a really strong element of contempt for Western culture and tradition.  The right, in turn, began to give lip service to deep nativist impulses that have always been a feature of American culture even while directly participating in left wing agendas that directly impacted and damaged the people they were pitching to.  Rust Belt denizens who felt that they'd been forgotten and abandoned by both parties and cultural elites were completely correct, they had been.

Hence what we are now seeing with Donald Trump.  Trump is a populist and if he seems a populist in the mold of Huey Long or Fr. Charles Coughlin, it's because he is. Both of those men from the 1930s pitched to the same base and in the same fashion, and if people suspected that they were anti democratic, it was was a suspicion that was merited in the first instance and correct in the second.  Indeed, Trump may be more like Long in his personality that Coughlin, who was more anti democratic but not personally tainted by personal vice.  

That should be really frightening as what that means is that a large demographic really doesn't care if what Trump does in an effort to retain power is democratic or not.  And that's what gave Italy a figure like Mussolini, Spain a figure like Franco, or Portugal Salazar.  They didn't seize power on their own, they obtained it as they were supported by a real base that had lost interest in democracy in the greater sense and who were concerned only about their own agendas, which they believed to be the correct agendas.

What this means is that the incoming President, Joe Biden, has a massive amount of work to do in order to address populist complaints.  Ultimately, all populist movements break upon reality and the key is to address the complaint, or alternatively to completely bury the complaining demographic politically.  Indeed, all totalitarian populist movements ironically achieve that latter result. Portugal went right from a right wing dictatorship to a radical Socialist government with nothing in between. The Spanish Falangist are thing of the political past.  In the US, however, the disgruntled populist demographic is too large to ignore.

Biden has only four years to really get this fixed.  It'll be a big task, but frankly not an impossible one.  To do it, he has to ignore the advice of his supporters who want to treat the nation like a giant sociology petrie dish.  Forcing more left wing ideology down the throats of the public on social issues will cement the populist drift of the GOP and likely bring a rapid end to Democratic power in Congress in 2022.  Biden, who was once a Republican, and who was at one time an observant Catholic, can return to much of his roots and assuage fears while also addressing issues that need to be addressed.  If that's done, he may come out a hero in what is likely to be his single term, and perhaps start to repair the damage being meted out to the country by a President who clearly doesn't respect American political culture.  Or he can ignore that, or just be ineffectual, and make the damage worse.

At some point, however, people who supported this poorly thought out effort to effect a sort of judicial coup will have to come to account.  We can expect them all to have long political careers, but like American politicians who said nice things about the Nazis in the 1930s, and not like the American politicians who said nice things about  the Soviets in the 1940s, they'll need to address it.  With this having been loosed in the hot wind of this election seasons, something is going to be need to send when the wind calms and the weather cools.  It'll be necessary for the country.

*It probably did put an end to speculation that Cruz would make a good Supreme Court justice.  There's no way he'd pass muster now.

2020 Thanksgiving Reflections.

One of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings used as wartime posters, first coming out in 1943.  They were based on his prewar January 1941 speech advocating for these freedoms. At the time of the speech, and certainly at the time of the war, a lot of people didn't have a freedom from want.

In some prior years I've put up a Thanksgiving Day post. Some years, I don't.

There's a lot of hubris in writing a blog, a principal part of that being the thoughts that 1) you have anything meaningful to say; and 2) anyone cares to read it.  In large part, probably neither of those are true, so no blogger should feel compelled to write an entry.  Still, some years. . . 

For a lot of people, this will be a Thanksgiving like no other. Well, rather, like no other one that that we recall. There are certainly plenty of North American Thanksgivings that more strongly resemble this one than we might imagine. * 

After all, the holiday was already fully established as a European religious observation long before the passengers of the Mayflower put in early as they were out of beer (which is in fact why they put in when they did).  We might imagine those early Thanksgiving celebrants looking like they were out of a Rockwell or Leyendecker illustration, but they likely rarely did.

Clean parents, chubby child. . . probably not very accurate for the early colonial period.  Carrying a matchlock on the way to church might be however, and not because they were going to hunt turkeys on the way home.  Illustration by J. C. Leyendecker from November 1917.

Indeed, a lot of the giving of thanks on days like this from prior eras was probably of a much more to the bone nature. The crop didn't fail, when it looked like it might.  The milk cow didn't bloat up and die.  The Algonquian's simply walked by the village a couple of months ago when it looked like they might attack.  That ship on the horizon wasn't a French one and no Troupes de Marne landed to raise the district.  The Spanish didn't arrive from the south.

Freedom from Fear.  For much of human history, most people lived in fear for at least some of the time.

Part of all of that, on top of it, was dealing with political and physical turmoil.

Smallpox arrived and went leaving people, if they were lucky, scarred for live.  The flu came and when it did people died nearly every time.  Horses kicked people in the ribs and they died in agony a few days later.  Dog and cat bites turned septic.  Tooth infections were caught too late causing fevers that went right to the brain and then on to death.

Storms came with only hours, or minutes, warning.  Hurricanes arrived with no notice.  Tornadoes ripped through villages at random.  Hail destroyed crops.  Early winters froze the crops in the ground. Spring thaws came suddenly and swept animals, houses, and people away.  Snow blocked travel and locked people who still had to work outdoors during the winter indoors.  People got lost, and then were lost forever.  Seafarers disappeared in winter storms and were never heard of again, or if they were they were, their washed up bodies were identified by the patterns in their wool sweaters, unique to individual villages, like dog tags of their day.

And added to that, there was the additional turmoil of vast struggles beyond people's control.  Catholics lived in fear of oppression from Protestants.  Protestant dissenters lived in fear of the Established Church.  Jews lived in fear of everyone.  Forces in England struggled against the Crown and each other and their fights spilled out to their colonies.  Native Americans lived in fear of a European population of an expansive nature that seemed to defy the laws of nature.  Africans lived in fear of slavers and if that fate befell them they thereafter lived in lifelong despair.

Freedom of Worship. Even this American value didn't come about until the scriveners of the Constitution prevented the United States from creating a state religion.  At the time of the Revolution the Congress had declared the Crown's tolerance of Catholicism in Quebec one of the "Intolerable Acts". As late as the Civil War Gen. Grant's General Order No. 11 targeted Jews.

The point is, I guess, that our ancestors endured all of this and made it.

Of course, they endured it better sometimes than in others.  When they lost the ability to at least get along, things got very bad indeed.  The most notable example, probably, came in 1860 to 1865 when Americans had reached the point where their differences could only be solved violently.

When those things got that way, one notable thing was the fragility of civility, order and even common sense.  In bad times Americans have done well if their leaders had a vision, even if disagreed with, and were clear about it, even if the opposition was distinct in that opposition.  A key to it was an overall sense that we were all in this together in spite of those differences.  The US did well as a society in the Great War, even with lots of failings, as it generally agreed with Wilson that something needed to be done in Europe and we had to do it, and even if we disagreed with that, we were all Americans and weren't going to send just our neighbor off to fight.  We did very well in World War Two uniting behind Franklin  Roosevelt and Harry Truman on the concept that we were a democratic nation, united by that, and we were going to bring those values to a world that had forgotten them, even if some wished the war hadn't ever come.  We did pretty well in the Cold War, with the exception of some real distress in the late 40s and early 50s, and again in the late 60s and early 70s, with the idea that we were freedom's sentinel, even if we didn't always like what that meant.

Right now, we're a mess.

We are not united on anything, and we've politicized everything.  And our polarization is massive.

We've been polarized of course before, but it's been sometime since we were this split, or so it would seem. Some would argue that we're really not, and that most are in the middle.

If we aren't mostly in the middle, the problem then becomes the point at which we arrive at a point at which we not only aren't, but we've reached the state where the polarized sides only see forcing their view at all costs upon the other as the solution.

Advanced nations have had that happen before.  Weimar Germany lived in a state of being that started off that way in 1918 and dissolved due to that in 1932.  It wasn't that there were not right wingers who valued democracy over force, or that there were not left wingers who valued democracy over force, but rather that people quit listening to them and opted for the parties that promised to force their views with dominating finality.

That is, of course, sort of what happened in 1860 to us, when one side decided that it had to have its way so much that it would leave to get it, and kill to maintain it.

Surely we're not there yet. But one thing we are is fatigued.  And that's not a good thing.  A lot of people have just had enough. They're worn down by the Pandemic. They're tired of politicians.  They don't want to hear anymore.  It's not that they're disinterested. 

They're tired.

So perhaps we can look back on those early North American Thanksgivings here a bit.  The crops didn't fail.  The North Koreans didn't attack South Korea. The Chinese didn't invade Taiwan.  The Russians didn't suddenly decide they wanted Poland back.

And yes, a lot of us fell ill, some will never fully recover, and some have died. That will continue on.  But as tragic as that is, we've had their better times and our prior health, and as grim as it is, it serves as a reminder that our path through here is temporary, and if, in the words of the old country song, we "don't have a home in this world anymore", well we never had a perfect one.

Freedom of speech, something which most people have not had except on a local level since at least the point at which society became advanced, but which is an American hallmark.

Related threads:

Thanksgiving Reflections

A Thanksgiving Passing

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

*Thanksgiving isn't really a North American holiday any more than its just an American one, in the larger sense, and this confusing entry here reflects that.  I'm mostly referring to the United States in this entry, and the predecessor English colonies, but not exclusively, as can be seen by text above that's more applicable to other areas.