On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. More additional labels.

Friday, November 23, 1923. Law and Radio.

President Coolidge was visited by members of Delta Theta Phi, a law fraternity.

On the same day, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union was established.

Germany banned the Communist and Nazi parties.  A third party, the Nationalist Party, was also banned.

Gustav Stresemann lost a vote of confidence in the Reichstag and resigned as the  Chancellor of Germany.

Australian radio station 2SB went on the air, giving Australia regular radio programming for the first time.  It is still on the air as Radio Sydny.

 

Blog Mirror: Old-fashioned Club Sandwiches

 I love Club Sandwiches.

Old-fashioned Club Sandwiches

Why am I posting this on Wednesday?

Because on Wednesdays I publish stuff that pertains to work.

I don't usually eat lunch, although recently, due to my messed up post surgery colon, and my messed up pre-surgery thyroid, I have been eating very light lunches.  Something like this I only have if I'm in a restaurant, and I'm only in a restaurant at noon if I'm doing so in some sort of work capacity.  When I do that, I always look for the club sandwich, if we're in a place I expect to have one. 

They're great.

Club Sandwiches trace back to New York of the late 19th Century, and seem to have appeared either at the Union Club of New York City or the Saratoga Club.  It's not clear which.  The first printed reference to them was in the Evening World, and referred to the Union Club. That was in 1889.  Amazingly, in this day and age in which social clubs have taken a pounding, the Union Club, which dates to 1836, still exists as a private social club.

Tuesday, June 5, 1923. North Casper to become part of Casper

It is simply unimaginable to me that North Casper was not always part of Casper.  I had, truly, believed it was.

Not so, apparently.

Weimar asked for a new reparations conference with the Allies, seeking to transfer 2.5 billion, in gold marks, of materials over a five-year period, and then 1.5 billion of the same for a period of time after 1928.

A huge Shriner's convention was in Washington, D.C.

This seems almost impossible to imagine now.

I don't know much about the Shriner's, other than that they are somehow associated with the Masons.  At one time, Protestant male membership in the organization was extraordinarily broad.  Indeed, while Catholics were and are precluded from being members of the organization, by way of Catholic Canon law and tacit preclusion, I know one devout Catholic locally who was.

The organization was hugely influential at the time.

President Harding, it would appear, was a member.

President Harding opened the national convention of the Shriner's, whose parade this was, with a speech that, in veiled form, criticized the Ku Klux Klan.

Secret fraternity is one thing. Secret conspiracy is another. In the very naturalness of association, men band together for mischief, to exert misguided zeal, to vent unreasoning malice, to undermine our institutions. This isn't fraternity. This is conspiracy. This isn't associated with uplift; it is organized destruction. This is not brotherhood; it is the discord of disloyalty and a danger to the Republic.

Harding's reviewing Shriner parade.

On the same day, the White House released Harding's Voyage of Understanding tour itinerary, featuring nineteen stops by train in the U.S. and Canada. The itinerary was to have been:

June 20 Washington, D.C.

June 21 St. Louis, Missouri

June 22 Kansas City, Missouri

June 23 Hutchinson, Kansas

June 24 Denver, Colorado

June 25 Cheyenne, Wyoming

June 26 Salt Lake City, Utah

June 27 Cedar City, Utah Visiting Zion National Park

June 28 Pocatello, Idaho

Idaho Falls, Idaho

June 29 Butte, Montana

Helena, Montana

June 30 Gardiner, Montana Visiting Yellowstone National Park

July 1 Gardiner, Montana

July 2 Spokane, Washington

July 3 Meacham, Oregon

July 4 Portland, Oregon

July 5 Tacoma, Washington Boarded the USS Henderson

July 6-25 Alaska Via the USS Henderson

July 26 Vancouver, British Columbia Via the USS Henderson

July 27 Seattle, Washington Via the USS Henderson

July 28 Portland, Oregon

July 29 Merced, California Visiting Yosemite National Park

July 30 El Portal, California

July 31 San Francisco, California

August 1 Los Angeles, California

August 2-3 Santa Catalina Island

August 4 San Diego, California

Harding would not complete the trip.

Easter Sunday, April 1, 1923

Members of the Wasatch Mountain Club members on the porch of the Hermitage, Ogden Canyon, Utah, Easter Day, 1923

It was Easter Sunday for 1923. 

The silent classic Safety Last!, starring Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis, premiered.   The movie is famous for its harrowing stunts, which were preformed by Lloyd.

The United Kingdom began numbering its highways.

France reduced the compulsory military service period from two years, to 18 months.

Saturday, October 21, 1922. Fall

Country Gentleman appeared at the stands with a Fall theme.

The Shriners held a huge barbecue in Washington, D.C.  Presumably the Budweiser was alcohol free.

The Saturday Evening Press had a fall theme too, but it was less obviousl

And there was the news of the day.

Thursday, May 21, 1942. Odd Fellows suspend conventions

Today In Wyoming's History: May 21: 1942   The Odd Fellows suspended their conventions and put money for the same into war bonds.

Tuesday, April 25, 1922. Events and Gatherings.

Navy Secretary Edwin Denby (center, light suit) with New York City Mayor Francis C. Hyland (to his right) and municipal officials visiting Washington to protest the proposed closure of the New York Navy Yard.

Washington Senators' Bucky Harris sliding, as he successfully steals third base in the 7th inning of a baseball game against the Boston Red Sox; third baseman Joe Dugan watches the ball roll toward left field after a wild throw. Senators shut-out Red Sox 10-0
 

 

Daughters of the War of 1812.

Communications, Church, and COVID-10

When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:

Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...

I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic.  The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses.  It had no other humane choice.  Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot.  A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.

Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule.  Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that.  There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages.  So a lot is going on in a Church.

During Lent, even more is going on.

So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong. 

Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.

Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local.  That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.

And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.

The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country.  And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be.  So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset.  A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things.  Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.

All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.

I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset.  In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point.   And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening.  But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much.  As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin?  And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession?  And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times.  Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness. 

Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason.  Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church.  Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid.  I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.

None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.

But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake.  Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled.  Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance.  That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.

Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.

Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed.  Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view.  There were ways to accommodate that.

And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.

A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.

We aren't.

Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me.  Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses.  But it goes beyond that.

Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30.  That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.

Nothing was.

What happened instead was a press release.

Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website.  Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago.  While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then.  It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its  focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.

But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.

And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:

Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May

Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:

Mass Closures To Continue

Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement.  So it'll get out that way.

But is that good enough?

I'm submit it isn't. 

Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive.  Most people don't read the newspapers anymore.  And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.

In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest.  Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners.  Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.

Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be.  There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view.  Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called Becoming Native To This Place.  It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.

So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news?  What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado?  You get the point.

Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church.  They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted.  Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.

An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made.  Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can.  It makes no sense at all.

The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will  not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed.  I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day.  Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.

As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere.  But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.

If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information.  And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog.  Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.

February 26, 1919. Grand Canyon and Acadia National Parks established, Soldiers and Sailors Club finds home in Casper, Mexican Federal Troops take positions up in Juarez, Dry Frontier Days

On this day in 1919, President Wilson passed legislation creating the Grand Canyon and Lafayette National Parks.  Lafayette National Park in Maine would be renamed Acadia National Park a decade later.

A Park Service item on the act and parks:

Unlikely SiblingsAcadia National Park, Grand Canyon National Park

Lots of strife was reported on in the Casper paper, but we've added this one to note the formation of the Soldiers and Sailors Club with temporary housing in the Oil Exchange Building.

That building, renamed the Consolidated Royalty Building, is still a prominent downtown Casper office building.  It was a new building at that time, having been built in 1917.

In Cheyenne, Frontier Days was announced to be "Dry" for 1919.

Mexican Federal troops were reported to be taking up positions to guard American interests around Juarez.

And in Cheyenne Carey was signing new legislation as the Wyoming State Tribune was making fun of human nature and the occupation of Germany.

January 19, 1919. Echos from a distant wall. Red Army commences assault on Allies in Northwestern Russia, the first real democratic German election, the Atrocities of the Turks upon the Armenians in Film, Welcomes to Returning Troops and Odd News.

On this day the Allied Expeditionary Force in northwestern Russia came under attack in a series of events that would lead to its practical defeat at the hands of the Red Army, even though it fought well throughout the ordeal.

The prior summer and fall the Allies, under the command of British General Poole, had advanced south from their bridgehead at Arkhangelsk.  The Americans had dispatched the 339th Infantry, a unit made up of Michigan and Wisconsin draftees, to the mission in northwestern Russia without instruction.  Upon arrival, their commander, Lt. Col Stewart (MoH from the Philippines) agreed to Gen. Poole's use of American troops and in fact he basically sat the rest of the expedition out from Arkangelsk thereafter.  The most successful unit of the campaign, in turn, turned out to be Company A of the 339th which advanced sought of the resort town of Shenkursk that fall.

Shenkursk in 1919. Shenkursk was a pre war restort town and had only come under Allied occupation that previous fall when a British commanded offensive caused Company A of the 339th Infantry to capture it.

Allied Expeditionary forces, in this case American, British and Canadian troops, came under attack in a major battle of the Russian Civil War that's all but forgotten, as in fact is the case for the Allied expedition in the context of being direct combatants itself, on this day in a Red Army effort to regain the ground lost that fall.

The Battle of Shenkursk commenced on this day with a giant Red Army artillery bombardment on Allied, principally American, positions at Nizhnyaya Gora followed by a 1,000 man bayonet charge on a position held only by 47 American troops of the 339th Infantry, and supported by nearby company of White Cossack's.  The American force obviously had no choice but to withdraw, but it was ordered to do so only after putting up as much as a delaying action as possible.  While they were doing this the Cossack company arrived but withdrew after their commanding officer was wounded, showing the unreliability of White forces.  By the time the American retreat was authorized, the streets of the town were covered by Red machine guns so an alternative route under heavy fire and with no artillery support was undertaken at great loss.  The artillery, for its part, was White Russian and the cannoneers at first abandoned their posts until they were compelled to return at pistol point by the overall American commander, Cpt. Otto "Viking" Odjard. Unfortunately, they returned to their posts too late to provide covering artillery fire.  As a result, only American soldiers, including their commander Lt. Meade, made it through the fire to return to Allied lines.

339th Infantry in Russia in 1918.  The majority of the men were conscripts from Michigan, rounded out by conscripts from Wisconsin.

Showing the unreliability of the Red troops next, they failed to followup on their initial success and the Americans were able to return to the field during the day and recover their wounded.  By nightfall, only nineteen remained uncovered, of which six were known to be dead.  During the night, two of the missing made it through the Red lines back to Allied lines.  

Unit crest of the 339th Infantry recalling their Russian service.

Overnight, Canadian field artillery arrived with artillerymen who took over two 3 in. filed artillery pieces that had been abandoned by the White Russians.  The Cossack company undertook a strategic withdrawal from Ust Padenga to Vsyokaya Gora without being detected by the Reds.  Over the next three days outnumbered Allied forces held on against repeated attacks by a reinforced Red Army.  The Allied forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Reds, but were ultimately compelled to withdraw on January 22.  By January 24, after fighting a delaying action at Sholosha, they arrived at Shenkursk where they were quickly surrounded by the pursing Red forces.

At Shenkursk Cpt. Odjard requested instructions from his commander, British General Edmund Ironside, who was in Arkangelsk.  Ironside ordered the Allied force to withdraw.  That withdrawal was commenced at midnight of January 24 by way of an unguarded logging trail.  The Allied withdrawal was conducted entirely at night and the Red Army commenced firing artillery on a new empty Shenkursk the morning of the 25th.  The retreating men occupied Vystavka on January 27 where  they were again engaged by the Reds over several weeks.  

The resulting Allied retreat cleared the far north western Russia of Allied forces and therefore constituted an important Red victory.  With the Allies marginalized in the north, the only forces opposing the Reds in that region were the Whites, who would prove to be ineffective in the north.

The Allied mission in Russia never had a clear purpose to start with and was seen in strikingly different terms by the different Allied forces committed to it.  In the east, the Americans were strictly precluded from engaging in offensive actions.  In the north, they'd been given no instructions at all and fell under British command. The British saw their mission as being to directly provide for the defeat of the Reds and to aid the various White forces.  The British commanded forces performed well and outfought the Red Army, but they were never committed in sufficient strength to be able to really engage an army the size of their growing opponents and had, in fact, basically outrun their ability to control ground in any event that prior fall.

The German flag under the Weimar Republic . . and again for the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949.

In Germany, proportional voting for the Reichstag, featuring the first election in which women were allowed to vote, took place, although the election was trailed out as German soldiers stationed in the East, where things remained tense, did not vote until February 2.  The election is regarded as the first really democratic election in German history.

The results were that the Social Democratic Party took 163 seats out of 421 giving them the largest block in the Reichstag but not a majority.  Second position went to the Centre Party, a Christian Democratic Catholic Party, which took 91 seats, with the third position going to the left of center German Democratic Party.  The German Communist Party didn't take any seats, but the Independent Socialist, a heavily left of center party took 22 seats.  The SDP would add two seats after the soldiers in the east voted in February.

Because the structure of the German government varied from other parliaments, the immediate impact of this is a little difficult to explain.  Philipp Scheidemann of the SDP would become the chancellor, but would only take office in February, and would ultimately resign in protest over the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

The initial German election offered some hope for the future as holding an election, for a country that had never had fully fair elections before, right after a major defeat in war and during the midst of a civil war is a difficult feat.  Under the circumstances, the election was a triumph for German democracy and, moreover, for the SDP which, while it did not obtain a majority of seats, acquired more than any other party and essentially had its views ratified by the majority of Germans, including a majority of serving soldiers.  Democracy in Germany would prove to be fragile, however, and the Germans would hold four more elections prior to the Great Depression really setting in. In that last pre Great Depression election the German National People's Party, a right wing nationalist party, took second position demonstrating the rise of German nationalism even before that time.  In that same election the Centre Party and the Communist Party, in third and fourth places, were not far behind the SDP, although all were fairly far behind it.  In the next election, 1930, the Nazi Party was in second place with 107 seats to the SDP's 143 and the Communist Party in third with 77.  In the last democratic election prior to World War Two the Nazi's supplanted the SDP as being in first position, taking 196 seats to the SDP's 121 while the Communist took an even 100.  Oddly enough, even under the Nazi's first election in 1933, the last election in which other parties appeared, the Communist took 88 and the SDP took 120.  No party ever had over 50% of the German vote in any election.

In Washington state the Knights of Columbus dedicated a hut for returning servicemen on this Sunday, January 19, 1919.  The Knights had been one of the really active service organizations of the Great War, which is remarkable in that the country remained, at that time, very much a Protestant country in spite of having a significant Catholic minority.

Closer to home, and in-spite of ongoing combat involving American troops in Russia, and no official peace in Europe, troops were pouring home.  Service organizations were turning their attention on that in an era in which the support for soldiers did not have the infrastructure it later would, as this "yard long" photograph of a dedication of a Knights of Columbus hut in Washington state demonstrates.

Like all service religion based service organizations of World War One, the Knights hut served everyone, not just Catholics.  

I've talked about the Knights of Columbus a little bit, but not much, in my threads about service and fraternal organizations I've posted here.  The Knights were formed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that fraternal organizations were huge in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. So huge, that membership in one was practically necessary for people in certain lines of work.  Some of those organizations were Protestant or at least Anti Catholic in nature and therefore Catholics could not join them, or they were secret societies which Catholics are precluded by their faith from joining.  So, as a reaction, the Knights were founded.

I've seen it claimed, and indeed in a state journal run by one of the various Knights of Columbus state organizations, that World War One abated anti Catholicism in the United States but I don't think that's really true.  Indeed, Al Smith would loose the Presidential election of 1928 principally because he was a Catholic.  It would take World War Two and the GI Bill to mainstream Catholics into American society and it would take the Presidency of John F. Kennedy to really blend them into the American fabric to such an extent that their distinctiveness was substantially lost, in no small part due to their own accommodations with American life that they had up until then not acquiesced to.  Interestingly enough, in spite of notable Catholics rising to high position in American life, including the featuring of some of them absolutely abandoning the positions of their faith, a strong element of prejudice remains, as exhibited during the 2016 Presidential election in which a Clinton staffer insulted the entire faith. Recently, interestingly enough, liberal commentator Jill Filipovic called the Knights of Columbus an extremist group for holding traditional Catholic opinions on such things as abortion and the nature of marriage, which would also put the Knights in tune with the bulk of human history and nature.  If it were any other group other than a Christian one, and more particularly a Catholic one, there'd be cries of outrage over that.  But as is often noted, anti Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice in American life.

Another anti Christian prejudice hit the movie screens on this Sunday, January 19, 1919, that being the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks, which was both ethnic and religious in character, the Armenians being ancient residents in the region in which the Turks were originally an invader and also a people that had remained faithful to their faith, the Armenian Apostolic Church. That church in fact one of the Apostolic Churches and today is in the Oriental Orthodox branch of the Apostolic faiths.  The Ottoman Turks were of course Muslims.  But to be fair they were also aggressive against all non Turkic people in their empire.

Ravished Armenia, also known as the Auction of Souls is a film for which only twenty minutes survives but it is a powerful film even at that.  The film, perhaps partially because some of it is original footage (I'm not certain), or perhaps because it appears to be, is nearly a documentary in character.  What's so additionally remarkable about this is that the Turkish atrocities were well known almost at the very moment they were committed, and yet Turkey continues to deny they occurred to this very day.   The film was based on a book by an Armenian survivor of Turkish atrocities who also stared in the film, Aurora Mardiganian, who was only 18 years old at the time the film was released.  At that time, she was recalling events of just a few years earlier, and she had herself escaped death by being sold into slavery and then escaping.

Armenian stamp honoring Mardiganian.

The film, not surprisingly, was subject to some censorship because it includes nudity, in the form of Armenian women being crucified nude by Turks.  Mardiganian somewhat objected to the portrayal, however, not because it was cruel or because of the nudity, but rather because she maintained that the Turks raped Armenian women and then impaled them through their vaginas in a particularly masochistic fashion that the film makers determined not to portray as it was so barbarous.  The film itself used many Armenian extras living in Southern California, which has a large Armenian population even today.  Sadly, over twenty of the extras died due being exposed to the Spanish Flu during the film.  

Mardiganian herself lived to old age and died in Californian in 1994.

If that film was too heavy of content, and it likely was for many, a comedy entitled Here Comes The Bride oped that weekend as well.

It doesn't survive, but frankly, it sounds like a typical pre Hayes Code cheesy comedy.

The Dub also opened that Sunday.

It was a comedy too, and it's also a lost film.

Or maybe it'd just be more entertaining, sort of, to read the paper that day.  Russian revolutionaries who were "spry" and had "sass", discharged soldiers shaving off the mustaches of NCO's., bad beer in the UK and radicalism in Cheyenne. . . . 

The Lions' Last Roar. The ongoing decline of service organizations.

I read in the paper earlier this week that the Lions Club is giving up sponsoring the local fair and rodeo parade, which its done for a decade.  This year is its last year.  The parade was held yesterday.

Of course, they drew that last parade in an election year, which must have been a pain.  I didn't watch but a few minutes of the parade, and that from an office window, but even at that I could tell it featured all the running politicians.

The reason the Lions are giving the parade up is a simple one. It takes about thirty people to do the parade, they reported. They're down to ten members.  As the Tribune reported, in an interview of the club's leader;

We looked at our membership. It takes an awful lot of people to put that parade on. Most service clubs have declining membership and ours has declined to the point we didn’t feel we could do it adequately. We notified the fair board officially in January but they knew it was coming. On a regular basis, we have about 10 members and it takes at least 30 people to start that parade, so we’ve taken advantage of our children and our wives and husbands.

Wow.

I've written about the decline in fraternal organizations before.  The Lions aren't really that, however. Their a service organization.  My prior posts probably somewhat confused the two and frankly most fraternal organizations have a service element to them.  Probably in the modern context they darned near all do.  But some organizations are expressly service organizations.  The Lions are one of them.

The Lions were founded in 1916 in Chicago.  It has 1.4 million members worldwide.  So it's still around and still relatively big.  But around here, it's not.  And that's common.

The Rotary Club, which seems to be doing much better, will be taking over.  Rotary International is a little older, having been formed in 1905.  I've known quite a few people who have been Rotarians, but I've also known a few Lions. The Lions I've known have been frank over the years that they were worried about the local clubs (there were at least two, maybe there still are) future. At some point, I'd think, you'd tip over a scale where the weight would be really against you.

Which is a shame, but then I myself have never been in a service or fraternal organization and don't really have any interest in joining one either.  But that's a feature of my character.  I wouldn't have been in one if this was 1968, or 1918.  It's just not me.  I'm glad its been somebody, however.

No place for boys. . .

or at least no officially sanctioned ones, anyway.  There will still be groups of boys organized without girls, probably largely self organized, and that's a problem.

The Third Liberty Load was a World War One era liberty loan drive.  Nearly every single thing about this poster would be regarded as abhorrent by our social guardians today.

The Boy Scouts of America's board of directors has unanimously agreed to welcome girls into the Cub Scout program and to forge a path for older girls to pursue and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout, the organization said Wednesday.

And why?

Well, because boys will be boys, and we can't have that.

There's basically a war on masculinity going on in this country and in Western society as a whole, waged by social theorists and backed and staffed by members of my profession, lawyers, whose allegiance is principally to the theory that everything presents a good cause of action.  And its destroying things.  I'd say that at some point it becomes dangerous, but we've passed that point long ago.  It needs to stop, and in a major way, but nobody has the guts to really take it on.

And this is an example of this.

I've posted on the Boy Scouts fairly recently.  In that item I went into the history of the Boy Scouts and how they came about. As noted in that post, the Boy Scouts were an expression of the "Muscular Christianity" movement, a movement principally focused in Protestant Faiths (the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity already had a strong masculine expression at the time).  The Boy Scouts specifically came about as Lord Baden Powell was getting concerned that British youth was exhibiting all the foundation of a mass of boiled noodles and looking rather pathetic in comparison to their equivalents in Africa who had been raised in a heartier more outdoorsy fashion.

That was, of course, because those Boer youth in Africa had been raised in a very outdoors fashion and the English were by that time largely urban, just as Americans are today.  But that concern existed even at that time in the United States and not without good reason.

And underlying theme of the early Boy Scouts was to instill Christian virtues in boys.  At a time in which a lot of children started working in their early teens there was reason to be concerned.  Looking back, its fairly amazing the extent to which American youth of that era did largely stick to the values they had been exposed to early on, as the pressure in the opposite direction was enormous.  I know, for example, that my grandfather was a loyal Catholic his whole life and that he was good friends with the Monsignor who was at the local parish.  He'd left home at age 13 and worked first in San Francisco.  How much strength of character must have that taken (and how adult were 13 year olds at that time)?

But that wasn't true of everyone.

 

Boy's scouting. . . but not in a good way.  Coal thieves, 1917.

One of the tragedies of the very recent modern world and a major problem for European society (of which we are part) has been the acceptance that there is such a thing as the feminine and denial that there is such a think as the masculine.  Both exist by nature, but modern social theorist abhor that fact.  This has meant, over time, that anything that is either masculine by social construction, or even more disturbingly by nature, has been attacked and has to be dismantled.  This has given is a bizarre world where female athletics must be protected, in that fashion, under Title IX while at the same time sports that are fairly naturally male (and which revert that at the professional level) must be open to any girl foolish and reckless enough to subject themselves to them.  Combat, the unfortunate occupation of men since the dawn of time, now must be open to women too, even though anyone even remotely familiar with what that means should be horrified.  And no male organization can stands.

Critics might reply that female ones are likewise open to men, but for the most part, men and boys want nothing to do with them. Yes, the Girl Scouts are open to boys but generally most boys would not want to join it, and those who do are likely unusual or have parents who are rather unusual.  Usually in their teens the attention of males starts focusing on females, but not in the sense that most teenage men want to hang out in a large group of teenage girls and attempt to engage them on that level.  Even as adults most men do not like being the only man in a group of women as the talk and interactions will rapidly become gender unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and uninteresting (let alone exceedingly complicated. . . the relationship between women, by nature, is subject to a set of seemingly genetically foreordained rules that no man understands or wants to understand).

In the real world, the world where young men form gangs by nature and where the attention of young men is naturally outdoors (as it naturally is for older men as well), and where the influences on the school yard and locker room are often highly immoral, having an organization dedicated to boys alone, lead by virtuous men, and with a focus on nature, would be a good thing.

But now, the societal Nazis have taken one of the few ones that existed down, to the loss of us all.  Can a feminist BDM be far behind?

__________________________________________________________________________________

Lest anyone wonder, as I've noted before, yes I was a Cub Scout, but I was only a Boy Scout for about 2.5 seconds.  Even in my day, which is now long ago, the Boy Scouts weren't what they once were, at least in my experience.  But they were boys.

Anyhow,. my comments here aren't due to any residual nostalgia for my days in Scouting. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed back then. But I also recognize that my experiences are just mine.  And I also feel that boys ought to have some place that they can seek to develop as men, without having to have the constant influence of the better half.  They'll get plenty of that elsewhere.  Having a few places they can go with just men and boys isn't too much to ask.

Lex Anteinternet: Sign of the times? Casper Petroleum Club to close...

We ran this news recently:

Lex Anteinternet: Sign of the times? Casper Petroleum Club to close...: Founded in 1949 with the purpose to “aid the industrial and productive interests of the State of Wyoming" the Casper Petroleum Club, a...

At that time the Club was going to try to stay open until December, but readers of the Tribune learned today that Saturday is going to be its last day.  It just doesn't have the resources to carry on.

The Club president, amongst other causes, noted the decline in private clubs nationwide, which no doubt has played a role.  Once a club just for oilmen and then businessmen, it long ago opened to all for membership, but its membership was declining.  Having weathered prior oilfield recessions, a declining base just wasn't sufficient this time.

The Big Picture: Elks Club Annual Gathering, September 13, 1916. Ohio.

Boy Scouts Incorporated under Federal Statute, June 15, 1916

Boy Scout poster during World War One encouraging participatin in the Third Liberty Loan.

The Boy Scouts of America were incorporated on this date under a Federal statutory provision.  This is very unusual, as most corporations are legal creatures of state law, not Federal law.

The Boy Scouts of America were part of a huge international movement started by Lord Baden Powell, a British Army officer who had once been the British Army's chief cavalryman.  Distressed by the lack of outdoor skills in British soldiers during the Boer War, he created the scouts tin encourage manly virtues in youth.  A girls variant soon followed.  The early movement emphasized "scouting", i.e., bush craft, as well as many virtues and Christian morals.

The Punitive Expedition: The Casper Daily Press, March 28, 1916

Note in this one the fruit and vegetable advertisement.  Quite a difference in regards to how available these things are today.

Thursday, February 24, 1916. Does prohibition prohibit?

The Germans captured Beaumont-en-Verdunois.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 24: 1916   The Cheyenne Men's Club discussed whether Prohibition "does or does not prohibit".  I'm not sure how to take that, but apparently with the looming move towards Prohibition coming on, they took up the topic. Attribution:  Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office.

Last edition:

Tuesday, February 22, 1916. German advance at Verdun.

Labels: 1910s, 1916 Cochinchina uprising, 1919, Battle of Verdun, French Indochina, Verdun France, World War One

Some Gave All: Wyoming Army National Guard Museum

Here we have yet another post that appeared on another one of our sites, that being the one dedicated to war memorials, that we're linking in here, as it shows us a lot of interesting things that relate directly to the focus of this blog, including some that have been commented on before.  As they say, and quite correctly, a picture is worth a thousand words, and these pictures, while not great.  Reveal quite a bit.  This "mirrored" posts depicts the Wyoming Army National Guard Museum in Cheyenne Wyoming.

As there was a fair amount of text in the original entry, we've set this off as quotes so that we can add our additional comments here and expand on it in the context of this post.

These photographs illustrate the location of the Wyoming Army National Guard Museum.  As I was taking this photo in an effort to illustrate the older, cavalry related, part of this structure, I failed to get a really good photo of the front of the museum.

The building was built in 1936, during a period of time during which cavalry was actually receiving increased attention in the American military.  The Wyoming National Guard (there was only an Army Guard at the time, as of course there was no Air Force at all, that being part of the Army) was cavalry at the time, being the 115th Cavalry Regiment. Some may wonder about the "AL" below the AD on the corner stone.  The AL is the date used in Masonry for the creation of the earth, and many buildings of this type during this era were dedicated with the participation of Masons.

Adding to this what these photos above (and below) depict is architectural evidence of a couple of really interesting things that were going on at the time.

Note the date of the construction, 1936, and what the building was constructed for, the Headquarters unit of the 115th Cavalry Regiment, Wyoming National Guard.

Cheyenne borders what was then Ft. D. A. Russell, which is now Warren Air Force Base.  This, then, tells us something about the oddity of how the Army and the National Guard interacted at the time.  Now, Camp Guernsey, the  huge Wyoming Army National Guard training range, is used nearly full time by units of various states Army National Guards as well as the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps.  In other words, the service had a high degree of interaction between the reserve and the active duty forces.  In 1936. .  . not nearly so much.  Indeed, it's really odd to think of a National Guard building being built just a few miles from a huge Army post. Why not just build a structure within the post grounds? Well, they didn't.

Additionally, note that this served a horse cavalry regiment, which shortly became a Horse Mechanized cavalry regiment. This stands counter to what a lot of people imagine occurring just three years prior to the German invasion of Poland. But in reality, cavalry not only remained in the U.S. Army in this period, but it had expanded in size and significance after World War One.

This wasn't folly, it reflected a sincere strategic concern. 

In retrospect, it's been enormously common to look down on the armies of World War Two, such as the American army and Polish army, and criticize them for retaining cavalry, as if they were mired in romanticism about the horse.  Far from it, in actuality, the lessons of World War One, when viewed in context, argued for mobility, and well into, and beyond, the late 1930s, that argued for the horse. The challenge was hot to retain mobility so that warfare didn't become static, like it had in late 1914, rather than mobile, and quick.  Armor in the original 1917-18 context didn't offer that promise, and it wasn't clear until World War Two that it did.

Indeed, there was actually quite a bit of horse cavalry action during World War One, something that's often forgotten or completely overlooked, and in some immediate post war examples cavalry was predominate.  Cavalry was hugely significant in the Russian Civil War and in the Russo Polish War, for example.  And, as nearly completely overlooked, ever single army during World War Two used horses, and quite a few armies, such as the Soviet Army, and yes the German Army, used quite a bit of cavalry.  It was World War Two, not World War One, that turned out to be the last big war featuring lots of cavalry.

So, in that context, the expansion of cavalry into the National Guard in the 1920s and 1930s makes a lot of sense. And that's what happened in Wyoming.

Wyoming's National Guard had only one pre 1920s National Guard cavalry unit, that being the Laramie Grey's.  Most of Wyoming's National Guard in the 19th Century was infantry. The reason is fairly simple. Cavalry is expensive.  Sure, there were a lot of people who rode in Wyoming in the 19th Century (and a lot of people who did not), but that didn't mean that the state would be able to provide a lot of horses for people to use once a week at drill (as Guard units, in that era, drilled once a week).  And people aren't necessarily keen on using their own horses for such things. Beyond that, quite a few of the best riders were not the people who would be in town and able to attend a National Guard drill every week.

Wyoming did, of course, famously contribute a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Second United States Volunteer Cavalry, during the Spanish American War. But that unit isn't properly considered to be a National Guard unit. Wyoming did provide some Guard units do the Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection, but none of them were cavalry.  In spite of that, it should be noted, the Wyoming Army National Guard retains the lineage of the Second United States Volunteer Cavalry, given Wyoming's role in raising this citizen soldier unit.

During World War One, in contrast, the Wyoming National Guard was artillery.  Artillery used a lot of horsepower in that era, and is pretty complicated to train men on, but that's what it was.  In the 1920s, however, as the Army became increasingly concerned about battlefield mobility, and as it operated to have more and more control over state Guard units and what they were, the Wyoming National Guard became cavalry. This was a cavalry armory.

Another interesting thing about this building's corner stone is the AL 5936 year mark, which is noted above. As noted above, this is a calendar year based upon a Masonic system.  The inclusion of Masons in the dedication of various public buildings has been noted on our blogs before, with both the Federal District Courthouse in Casper and the Colorado State House having cornerstones noting the same.  This demonstrates how significant fraternal organizations were in earlier eras, as this simply would not happen now.  Indeed, including such a mark on a cornerstone now would likely be controversial.  But at the time, it clearly was not.

It also is interesting in the context of the year system, as it reflects a once fairly common view that the world was only a little over 5,000 years old. There are still those who adhere to this, but it is certainly the common scientific view that the world is billions of years old, and most Christian faiths have no problem with this.  The AL system relied upon a fairly common set of efforts by various individuals to determine the age of the world by way of the Bible, even though the Bible never states how old the world is.

Its interesting to note that the Jewish year for 1936 would have been 5696, which isn't greatly different, is also based on the year of creation, with the initial  year being the year before the creation.  Most contemporary Jews would not have a problem with the scientific position that the world is billions of years old.

The calendar date for the Gregorian calendar here is noted as "AD 1936". This too is telling.  AD, of course, stand for Anno Domini, or Year of Our Lord.  As opposed to the AL system noted above, or the AM system of the Jewish calendar (the Year of the Word), the AD system is tied closely to an actual event, that being the birth of Christ. While some may scoff, the fact that the early history of Christianity featured twelve individuals going as far about the globe as they could, all with the same story, and all with the same practices, and  that they left very lengthy letters regarding it, pretty much fixes in time the event and that it happened.

The interesting thing about "AD" as a calendar date is that the whole glove now uses it, but some scholars have recently reworked AD as BCE, that standing for Before the Common Era.  This is a sort of snooty way of devaluing the Christian nature of a calendar that came about as a Papal reformation of an existing Christian calendar, but ironically, it enforces it. What's "common" about the "Common Era". Well, the Christian influence. Again, we have the remarkable fact that twelve men spread all over the known globe for a message that required them to live in poverty and to die for the message, and yet they retained the same on, and that this soon spread over the civilized world and change it. That's the common feature of the Common Era.  That some would even feel compelled to have to deny this is something that wouldn't have come about until our own era.

This shows the front of the building. This structure was used as a National Guard Armory from the 1930s until some time until the 1970s, but I suspect the brick structure was a latter addition.   These small armories became very unsuitable for continued use by the 1960s, and were replaced in quite a few instances during the 1970s to contemplate the need for much larger armories.  Compounding this need was the fact that in some instances, such as in Casper and Cheyenne, the old armories were well within the city limits by the 1960s making their use for military purposes difficult.

Not only is this true, we've noted it before with the photographs of the Casper Armory that came down in the late 1980s.  At any rate, the added element of the story I didn't fill in is that after the Cold War small town armories disappeared altogether, or at least they ceased to be used as armories.  All sorts of National Guard armories that existed in the 1980s when I was in the Guard are no longer used.  Only the bigger towns tend to retain armories, or areas that are so isolated that there's no other choice but to have them. Armories that once existed, for example, in Rawlins, Riverton, Wheatland and Thermopolis no longer do.  However, in some ways that's a long term trend.  Small Glenrock Wyoming had a National Guard unit in the 1920s and 1930s.  It hasn't since World War Two.

M7 105 Gun Motor Carriage. The Wyoming Army National Guard's 300th Armored Field Artillery used these during the Korean War, during which they won a Presidential and a Congressional Unit Citation for an action in which they directly engaged attacking Communist forces.

After World War Two, much of the Wyoming Army National Guard was converted to artillery and became the 300th AFA, as noted here. They used this fine gun, although it was already entering obsolescence.  Fearing the same chassis as the M4 Sherman tank, this was a very good self propelled gun.  By the late 1950s, however, it was obsolete in the U.S. Army, although it soldiered on in other armies into the 1970s.

This is a M59 Armored Personnel Carrier, two of which are on display at this museum.  I'm not aware of any Wyoming Army National Guard unit using these, but some must have as the other items on display here were definitely used by the Wyoming Army National Guard.  Wyoming's units included the 115th Mechanized Cavalry, the descendant of the 115th Cavalry and the 115th Cavalry (Horse Mech), in the 1950s and perhaps onto the 1960s, at which point the cavalry was phased out and the 115th lineage was carried on by the 115th Artillery Regiment.  The former cavalry units became battalions of the 49th Field Artillery along with the 300th AFA.  Today, those units are smaller and are once again the 300th AFA.

I was surprised to see this in the Guard's collection, but they must have used some when the Guard here still had mechanized cavalry.  These early APCs established the American type, but they were always problematic in some sense.

This is a USS M777 155mm howitzer, which is a gun still used by the US military.

This isn't an obsolete howitzer.  The fact that it would show up in this collection, however, shows the extent to which rockets have taken over in the heavy artillery field, in the U.S. Army.