May 12, 1941. Roll On Columbia.

 On this day in 1941, Woody Guthrie went to work for the Bonneville Power Administration.

The HMS Ladybird was sunk off of Tobruk. On the same day, however, a large British convoy with a significant amount of British armor in Alexandria.

The Ladybird settled in shallow water where she became an anti aircraft platform, ironically, as he'd been sunk by dive bombers.

The Japanese government delivered to the US government a proposal regarding the ongoing difficulties betwen the two nations.  It read:

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM AGREED UPON BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN

The Governments of the United States and of Japan accept joint responsibility for the initiation and conclusion of a general agreement disposing the resumption of our traditional friendly relations.

Without reference to specific causes of recent estrangement, it is the sincere desire of both Governments that the incidents which led to the deterioration of amicable sentiment among our peoples should be prevented from recurrence, and corrected in their unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.

It is our present hope that, by a joint effort, our nations may establish a just peace in the Pacific; and by the rapid consummation of an entente cordiale [amicable understanding], arrest, if not dispel, the tragic confusion that now threatens to engulf civilization.

For such decisive action, protracted negotiations would seem ill-suited and weakening. Both Governments, therefore, desire that adequate instrumentalities should be developed for the realization of a general agreement which would bind, meanwhile, both Governments in honor and in act.

It is our belief that such an understanding should comprise only the pivotal issues of urgency and not the accessory concerns which could be deliberated at a conference and appropriately confirmed by our respective Governments.

Both Governments presume to anticipate that they could achieve harmonious relations if certain situations and attitudes were clarified or improved; to wit:

1. The concepts of the United States and of Japan respecting international relations and the character of nations.
2. The attitude of both Governments toward the European War.
3. The relations of both nations toward the China Affair.
4. Commerce between both nations.
5. Economic activity of both nations in the Southwestern Pacific area.
6. The policies of both nations affecting political stabilization in the Pacific area.

Accordingly, we have come to the following mutual understanding:-

I. The concepts of the United States and of Japan respecting international relations and the character of nations.

The Governments of the United States and of Japan jointly acknowledge each other as equally sovereign states and contiguous Pacific powers. 

Both Governments assert the unanimity of their national policies as directed toward the foundation of a lasting peace and the inauguration of a new era of respectful confidence and cooperation among our peoples.

Both Governments declare that it is their traditional, and present, concept and conviction that nations and races compose, as members of a family, one household; each equally enjoying rights and admitting responsibilities with a mutuality of interests regulated by peaceful processes and directed to the pursuit of their moral and physical welfare, which they are bound to defend for themselves as they are bound not to destroy for others; they further admit their responsibilities to oppose the oppression or exploitation of backward nations.

Both governments are firmly determined that their respective traditional concepts on the character of nations and the underlying moral principles of social order and national life will continue to be preserved and never transformed by foreign ideas or ideologies contrary to these moral principles and concepts.

II. The attitude of both Governments toward the European War.

The Governments of the United States and Japan make it their common aim to bring about the world peace; they shall therefore jointly endeavour not only to prevent further extension of the European War but also speedily to restore peace in Europe.

The Government of Japan maintains that its alliance with the Axis Powers was, and is, defensive and designed to prevent the nations which are not at present directly affected by the European War from engaging in it.

The Government of Japan maintains that its obligations of military assistance under the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy will be applied in accordance with the stipulation of Article 3 of the said Pact.

The Government of the United States maintains that its attitude toward the European War is, and will continue to be, directed by no such aggressive measures as to assist any one nation against another. The United States maintains that it is pledged to the hate of war, and accordingly, its attitude toward the European War is, and will continue to? be, determined solely and exclusively by considerations of the protective defense of its own national welfare and security.

III. The relations of both nations toward the China Affair.

The Government of the United States, acknowledging the three principles as enunciated in the Konoe Statement and the principles set forth on the basis of the said three principles in the treaty with the Nanking Government as well as in the Joint Declaration of Japan, Manchoukuo and China and relying upon the policy of the Japanese Government to establish a relationship of neighborly friendship with China, shall forthwith request the Chiang Kai-shek regime to negotiate peace with Japan.

IV. Commerce between both nations.

When official approbation to the present Understanding has been given by both Governments, the United States and Japan shall assure each other to mutually supply such commodities as are, respectively, available or required by either of them. Both Governments further consent to take necessary steps to the resumption. of normal trade relations as formerly established under the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan.

V. Economic activity of both nations in the Southwestern Pacific area.

Having in view that the Japanese expansion in the direction of the Southwestern Pacific area is declared to be of peaceful nature, American cooperation shall be given in the production and procurement of natural resources (such as oil, rubber, tin, nickel) which Japan needs.

VI. The policies of both nations affecting political stabilization in the Pacific area.

a. The Governments of the United States and Japan jointly guarantee the independence of the Philippine Islands on the condition that the Philippine Islands shall maintain a status of permanent neutrality. The Japanese subjects shall not be subject to any discriminatory treatment.

b. Japanese immigration to the United States shall receive amicable consideration-on a basis of equality with other nationals and freedom from discrimination.

Addendum.

The present Understanding shall be kept as a confidential memorandum between the Governments of the United States and of Japan.

The scope, character and timing of the announcement of this Understanding will be agreed upon by both Governments.

[Annex]

ORAL EXPLANATION FOR PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO THE ORIGINAL DRAFT [63]

II. Par. 2.

Attitude of Both Governments toward the European War.

Actually the meaning of this paragraph is virtually unchanged but we desire to make it clearer by specifying a reference to the Pact. As long as Japan is a member of the Tripartite Pact, such stipulation as is mentioned in the Understanding seems unnecessary.

If we must have any stipulation at all, in addition, it would be important to have one which would clarify the relationship of this Understanding to the aforementioned Pact.

III.

China Affair.

The terms for China-Japan peace as proposed in the original Understanding differ in no substantial way from those herein affirmed as the "principles of Konoe." Practically, the one can be used to explain the other.

We should obtain an understanding, in a separate and secret document, that the United States would discontinue her assistance to the Chiang Kai-shek regime if Chiang Kai-shek does not accept the advice of the United States that he enter into negotiations for peace.

If, for any reason, the United States finds it impossible to sign such a document, a definite pledge by some highest authorities will suffice.

The three principles of Prince Konoe as referred to in this paragraph are:

1. Neighborly friendship;
2. Joint defense against communism;
3. Economic cooperation-by which Japan does not intend to exercise economic monopoly in China nor to demand of China a limitation in the interests of Third Powers.

The following are implied in the aforesaid principles

1. Mutual respect of sovereignty and territories;
2. Mutual respect for the inherent characteristics of each nation cooperating as good neighbors and forming a Far Eastern nucleus contributing to world peace;
3. Withdrawal of Japanese troops from Chinese territory in accordance with an agreement to be concluded between Japan and China
4. No annexation, no indemnities;
5. Independence of Manchoukuo.

III. (sic)

Immigration to China.

The stipulation regarding large-scale immigration to China has been deleted because it might give an impression, maybe a mistaken impression, to the Japanese people who have been offended by the past immigration legislation of the United States, that America is now taking a dictating attitude even toward the question of Japanese immigration in China.

Actually, the true meaning and purpose of this stipulation is fully understood and accepted by the Japanese Government.

IV.

Naval, Aerial and Mercantile Marine Relations.

(a) and (c) of this section have been deleted not because of disagreement but because it would be more practical, and possible, to determine the disposition of naval forces and mercantile marine after an understanding has been reached and relations between our two countries improved; and after our present China commitments are eliminated. Then we will know the actual situation and can act accordingly.

Courtesy visit of naval squadrons.

This proposal, (b) of IV. might better be made a subject of a separate memorandum. Particular care must be taken as to the timing, manner and scope of carrying out such a gesture.

V.

Gold Credit.

The proposal in the second paragraph of V. has been omitted for the same reasons as suggested the omission of paragraphs (a) and (c).

VI.

Activity in Southwestern Pacific Area.

The words, in the first paragraph, "without resorting to arms" have been deleted as inappropriate and unnecessarily critical. Actually, the peaceful policy of the Japanese Government has been made clear on many occasions in various statements made both by the Premier and the Foreign Minister.

VIII.

Political Stabilization in the Pacific Area.

As the paragraph (a) implying military and treaty obligation would require, for its enactment, such a complicated legislative procedure in both countries, we consider it inappropriate to include this in the present Understanding.

Paragraph (b) regarding the independence of the Philippine Islands has been altered for the same reason.

In paragraph (e) the words "and to the Southwestern Pacific Area" have been omitted because such questions should be settled, as necessity arises, through direct negotiation with the authorities in the Southwestern areas by the Governments of the United States and of Japan respectively.

Conference.

The stipulation for holding a Conference has been deleted. We consider that it would be better to arrange, by an exchange of letters, that a conference between the President and the Premier or between suitable representatives of theirs will be considered when both the United States and Japan deem it useful to hold such a conference after taking into due consideration the effect resulting from the present Understanding.

Announcement.

In regard to the statement to be issued on the successful conclusion of the present Understanding a draft will be prepared in Tokio and cabled to Washington for the consideration of the United States Government.

March 28, 1921. Empires coming and going.

Street in Seattle on March 28, 1921.

Things went from bad to worse for Charles I, the last Austro Hungarian Emperor, when newly created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia warned Hungary that if the regained the Hungarian throne, they'd declare war on Hungary.

All of those countries, combined with Austria, had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and they feared that Charles I's restoration as King of Hungary would be followed by a claim to restore the Austro Hungarian Empire.

Winston and Clementine Churchill were the subjects of a reception at the Government House in Jerusalem.

Also present was Abdullah I and his entourage.  Abdullah's army had occupied Jordan without opposition.  He was a British client, but the situation was tense as his actions were not yet recognized as legitimate.

The U.S. launched the USS Corry, a Clemson class destroyer that would serve only nine years.  The ship had been ordered in World War One, like all of the ships then being commissioned, but finished to late to serve in the war.

The Corry was one of 60 ships decommissioned as too expensive to maintain at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Australian Department of Civil Aviation was formed as the Civil Aviation Branch of the Australian Defense Department.

An Easter Egg roll was held on the White House grounds.  Easter was the day prior in 1921.

"Bidenomics" and the return of the Great Society. . . and why that isn't good.

Lyndon Johnson in 1915.

I'm linking this in here not because I agree with the article, but because I don't.

How Bidenomics Unites America: A quarter century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican’s proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and...

As can be seen, Robert Reich, an economist who was in the Clinton Administration, asserts by way of his caption in this piece that "Bidenomics" "unites America".

It'll unite it, alright.  In bankruptcy, dependency and inflation.

Biden's COVID relief bill has been rightly criticized as the enactment of a set of liberal economic wish lists.  It's level of expense, as noted in our last Zeitgeist issue, is beyond that of the last several wars fought by the U.S. combined and, amazingly exceeds the amount spent in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  It's as if Lyndon Johnson got every Great Society wish he ever had, and more so.

Billed as necessary relief to the economy during the pandemic, the bill ignores the fact that the American economy was actually little impacted by the pandemic in a universal way.  It was impacted, but only in selective "service" industries.  If you owned an airline, for example, you were hurt.  If you owned a trucking company or a railroad, you weren't.  If you were employed in IT, you were probably not hurt.  If you worked in a restaurant, you likely were. Indeed, almost 100% of unemployment in the pandemic has been in the service industry.

This doesn't mean that we should simply forget people, or industries, in the hurt category, but what it does mean is that spending cash economy wide with wild abandon doesn't send the money where it's needed.  It sends it into an economy that's otherwise doing pretty well, which will superheat it.

Indeed, we're repeating the errors of the late 1960s in all sorts of ways, that being one.  In the 1960s  the US superheated the economy with the combined Great Society and Vietnam War, an expense level which likely didn't match anywhere near what we're currently spending.  We paid for that by inflating our way out of it, robbing the incomes of average Americans and depleting their savings by directly reducing their value.  Some maintain that the high inflation rates of the late 1960s, which got out of control in the 1970s, were brought about intentionally as the inflation reduced the value of loans the government took out to pay for the era's massive military and social budgets.  Nearly any economist who has looked at it has concluded the dual effort of trying to send Ho Chi Minh out of South Vietnam and poverty out of the United States was an economic strain that the US simply couldn't bear.

The dual expenses went on into the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan's presidency began to address them. The defense budget remained high, but Reagan campaigned against the Great Society, which had become unpopular with Middle Class Americans.  The American welfare state came to an end, however, during Clinton.

Now its back, thanks in no small part to Donald Trump and the last four years.

Dating back to Reagan, but not really before then, the GOP was associated with "fiscal conservatism".  Reagan was, of course, also a social conservative, but it's really the Reagan era in which both of these things united in Buckleyite conservatism.  Richard Nixon, for example, was pretty content with big spending on the Vietnam War and social programs as well.  

Reagan has been lauded over the past forty years as a great man, but he was hated in his own era and the latent anger at him really comes through in Reich's post.  Liberals of the 1960s rejoiced in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, which did indeed have aspects of merit to it, but which also had elements of real social destruction threaded into its experimentation that the nation has never been able to recover from or ween itself off of.  In some ways, many of the urban social ills afflicting the nation today and particularly afflicting some minority populations can be laid at Lyndon Johnson's posthumous doorstep, even though he very deeply desired to help those populations.

Now, as Reich notes, Reagan is gone, swept out the door by a petulant self loving Donald Trump who preferred to wipe out the GOP's chances of retaining the Senate rather than see himself go down in inevitable defeat.  The only stolen election in 2020 was the one that Trump stole from the GOP in 2021.   Georgia would have remained Republican but for Trump.

Not that Trumpism didn't have a massive, ironic, impact on the GOP over the last four years, although the seeds of that were sewn back as early as 2016.  Whatever else the conservative Reagan GOP may have stood for, it really wasn't a party of the common man in a populist sense.  William F. Buckley wasn't a guy you were going to invite over for a dog and a beer on the Fourth of July and he sure wasn't going to invite you over for one. . . ever.   

The economic sense of that GOP was a "rising all boats" sense of things in which if capitalist were allowed free reign the economy would do well and everyone would do well with a good economy.  By and large, while railed at against the time, that GOP was proven right overall. What it didn't worry much about, however, was the impact that exporting work overseas would have on the industrial laboring blue collar worker or the impact that a massive immigration rate would have on the same class.

The Democrats didn't take that view of the economy but they didn't worry about exporting work or immigration either.  Indeed, their view was that you could always spend your way out of these problems somehow, with money from somewhere.  

Thread through the GOP theme at the time was the belief that you ought to pay for what you agree to spend for, although the GOP was never able to really manage it. With yet another irony, the only President who did during the pre Trump era was Bill Clinton, who ran a budget surplus in at least one year. So, while hated by conservatives, Clinton was the only President since prior to the Great Depression who managed a balanced budget and who eliminated welfare.

When the populist seized the GOP and Trump agreed to fly their flag, he also abandoned any pretext towards budgetary restraint, bringing in a further irony.  Trump played off of populist desires and indeed acted on some, but certainly not all.  One thing he didn't do, however, was to worry about balanced budgets and the GOP simply quit worrying about them as well.

That Trump wouldn't worry about them is no surprise.  People liked to say that "he's a businessman" and they therefore assumed he'd run the government like a business, something that no politician has managed to do that I can recall save for António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, who was an economist by training, and dictator by practice, and who didn't think that his governance style would survive himself.  The departure from fiscal conservatism, however, was massively significant in that it destroyed any Republican credence to argue for it.

Of course, as noted, the Trump presidency didn't only destroy that.  In its late state Trump effectively destroyed the GOP's retention of the Senate and reduced its image in the minds of non populist voters, many of whom have now departed the party.  Right now, it's busy trying to restrict the vote in various states, a strategy that will prove disastrous.  Hoping to take back the House in 2022, my prediction is that the infusion of free money, a rebounding economy, and grasping tightly to Trump will sink those chances and the GOP tide, which was rising but for Trump, will start to recede pretty quickly.  With support for an insurrection dangling above its head, getting out any message will be difficult for an American culture that will rapidly get used to Uncle Sugar sending out cash.

And sending out cash it plans on doing.  This year some parents will receive up to $3600 per child simply because they have children.

$3600 isn't enough to live on, so comments about it being a Universal Basic Income are very much overdone.  But the direct cash payment is a disturbing concept.  There's no imposed restraint on it.  It's well demonstrated that the best indicator that a child won't grow up poor is if the child grows up in a two parent household.  That's proven.  It's also proven that the most dangerous person in a child's life is the non biologically related male who is shacking up, probably temporarily, with the mother of a child.  Tragic proof of that can be provided by a recent toddler murder in Cheyenne.  Linking a payment to marriage, preferably of the parents, or some other sort of logic social control, would make sense, but the Democrats do not believe in social controls.  Lots of the payments will go to deserving parents.  Lots of it will go to underserving parents as well and never make it to the child.  It won't lift many out of poverty and by encouraging marrying the government, in essence, it will make more poor in the end.  The trail is well blazed.

The payment, of course, is limited to just this year, but already Chuck Schumer is seeking to make it permanent, which has another element to it. An enthusiastic Democratic backer on Meet the Press repeatedly claimed that with this payment "we're just giving you back your taxes", but we aren't.  We're giving money from other people's taxes and money that we borrowed from the Chinese who just this week launched a massive cyber attack on the United States and which is preparing for war against us.  The morality of such a payment scheme is, therefore, questionable in the larger sense.

Here I do indeed depart from traditional Republican taxation views.  I'm not opposed to taxation at the higher income rates disproportionally, which of course already occurs.  I'm opposed to massive borrowing (and indeed any borrowing) to pay for the government.  All taxes, in some ways, separate people's cash from their wallets by force.  I'm not of the view that "taxation is theft", but I do think that any taxation based expenditure, which are all government expenditures , should implicitly come with the question of "would I voluntarily pay for that".  If the answer to that is yes, maybe there's a way it could in fact be voluntarily paid for, which in fact most social expenditures were at one time.

Anyhow, this gets back to the concept of Distributism, but if you are going to tax to "redistribute", you aren't going to achieve that in this fashion unless you do it at a Scandinavian level.  And if you are going to do that, you ought to spend the money in a manner which involves just handing people cash.  

Spending it on actual projects that have societal value, like nuclear power plants., electrification of railroads, building a new modern Navy, education in science and engineering, and the like would achieve something needed and valuable.  And indeed, having just passed one massive spending bill a massive infrastructure bill is just behind it.

Reich concludes his post with the following two paragraphs.

The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists have argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.

The first item (also a belief of liberal hero John F. Kennedy) may well have been wrong. The second, however, certainly wasn't rubbish.  Indeed, that dependency helped bring about the Trump era.  And, as for rubbish:

Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.

The bottom two thirds will soon be lower than that, unless the economy really tanks.  But what is far more likely will be that Bidenomics will tank all of the other liberal spending wishes did, just as the Vietnam War did for the Great Society. The damage will have been done by then, however, and we'll be trying to find our way out of a new inflationary cycle that will destroy the savings of the very Middle Class that, in part, Reich asserts he wishes to see helped.  Ironically, Donald Trump will share the blame with Joe Biden for that, and the GOP will be in a poor position to argue anything.

Friday Farming: The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s.

It's a really popular thing to look back on the past in a rosy way and agriculture provides no exception.  Indeed, a lot of people look back to a romantic sort of imagined past about prior farming generations and what the economics of farming were like.

Indeed, back two decades ago now (my how time flies, eh?) there was a popular pundit of the quasi apocalyptical nature who was convinced that computers were all going to go belly up on the first day of the present millennium and we'd be thrown back into a sort of dark ages.  He still thinks that we'll be so thrown back, and indeed I think he secretly hopes for it, but one of the things he maintained at the time as that this would be worse than the Great Depression as so many people had farms to go back to, he believed, in the 1930s.

Well, maybe they partially did, but what' people like that fail to realize is that the depression for farmers started in the very early 1920s, not 1929.  

Lots of things played into this, including a vast cycle of over production in North America that commenced with Europe entering into World War One, a dry climatic period that came in the 1920s following a wet one in the 1910s, and the relentless onset of mechanization.

A couple of blogs dealing with the topic by folks more knowledgeable than I.

Agricultural Depression, 1920–1934

WHEN AGRICULTURE ENTERED THE LONG DEPRESSION IN THE EARLY 1920S

Perry Mason, Season 1.

I have no first hand recollection of the Perry Mason television show which ran from 1957 to 1966.  of course, when it went off the air in 1966, I was three years old.  Still, I know that it ran in syndicated reruns but I never watched it for more than a few minutes, and it always appeared rather boring.  To a kid, it probably would have been.  I didn't know until recently that the Mason character was based on a series of books that first came out in 1933.

I know that now as HBO has put out a new Perry Mason series that just premiered this year.  This entry is a review of that series, not the television series.

Still, because the television series is so famous, it's not really possible to deal with the new HBO series without dealing with the tv series, and indeed, the HBO series basically acknowledges that.  Taking off before the legendary Los Angeles trial lawyer's career is supposed to have started, Mason is uniquely suited for this treatment as apparently lawyer, turned author, Earl Stanley Gardner, never bothered to fill in the background details of his character.  In very early novels, apparently, some slight clues to Mason's past were inserted, but that's about it.  In later ones, people just took it for granted that Mason was a solo practitioner super trial lawyer with a strong investigative streak and didn't look for more.

If that seems odd, modern television shows often don't offer more than that either.  Some do, but many do not.

Anyhow, there were a huge number of Perry Mason novels written by Gardner, followed by movies, and then ultimately the television series, all set in the time in which they were written or filmed.

HBO's series takes the opposite approach, putting the character back into the early 1930s in the depth of the Great Depression, just as prohibition is about to end, and introduces us to a disaffected, not yet lawyer, Mason played by Matthew Rhys.  It's done brilliantly.

Rhy's Mason isn't yet the super lawyer.  Rather, he's a Depression era dairy farmer turned private detective.  He's also way down on his luck. An air strip is crowding his farm, which is down to two cows.  His family has left him.  He's a heavy drinker who has a "blue discharge" (a discharge that simply discharged from the service, usually given due to morals charges that weren't developed) from the Army in World War One.  He's suffering from PTSD, as we'd now term it, and early on we learn why.

He's working for an elderly Los Angeles lawyer who has practiced a bit beyond his mental acuity who is assisted by an extremely able Della Street (Juliet Rylance).  The series takes us to a complicated story involving the kidnapping and murder of an infant in which the mother is accused.  I'll not get into the plot beyond that except to note that the plot informs us on how Mason becomes a lawyer.  

The entire season one (there will not be at least a season two) is excellently done. The plot is extraordinarily complicated but not so much that it's impossible to follow.  Fans of Foyle's War will find a similar approach in that regard except that the pacing is blisteringly fast (I actually had to watch a couple of the episodes twice in order to figure out what was going on with all of them).  Like Foyle's War the series has a sense of reality about it which is achieved in part by either making reference to actual events of the time.  The Ludlow Massacre is a frequent and surprising reference. The Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) subplot draws loosely on an actual California female evangelist of the period.  A fan of history will catch these references but the non student of history doesn't need to know of them to view the series. Still, such details is unusual and captivating for a history fan.

One thing that I should note is that, like Babylon Berlin, set in a similar time period (1920s Germany) the HBO series isn't shy about nudity at all, and likewise it's really gritty in its portrayal.  Prostitution is a feature of both series but in Perry Mason its given a really dark unattractive edge it deserves.  Indeed, while nudity and sexual portrayals occur throughout the film, much of the nudity in Perry Mason is far from erotic.  Parents, however, should be cautious and likely not let younger people watch the series.

On material details, the show is excellent.  The early 1930s, which is a lot of ways harkened back to the late 1920s, is well depicted and no errors were detected.  The racism of the period is well dealt with.  

An oddity of the show, although not an enormous distraction in it, is the unusual focus on homosexuality.  Della Street, who appeared in the television series as Mason's assistant, shows up in this series as well, in her early days as the assistant of E. B. Jonathan, the older lawyer that Mason is working for.  In the television series viewers were always left wondering if there was a romantic relationship between Street and Mason that was just under the surface, and viewers here might somewhat wonder if that's a possibility in future episodes as well, but here Street's character is really developed and we learn that she's a well educated woman in a homosexual relationship with another woman.  The story line isn't necessary for the plot, but it isn't a huge distraction either.  We also learn, however, that Mason has a "blue discharge" from the Army, in which he was a World War One era captain, and it's hinted at that it was for a homosexual act, although we know that he's been married and has a son.  We also learn in the series that Ivy League educated future District Attorney (he's an Assistant DA here) is also a homosexual.

The list of characters above does indicate, we should note, that fans of the 1950s/60s television who will recognize some characters, but they may not be identically portrayed.  Street, in this HBO series, may be on her way to becoming a lawyer.  Burger is on his way to becoming the DA.  Paul Drake was apparently an investigator for Mason in the series, and we are introduced to him here, but he's an African American in the HBO series, which is critical to the plot.

Probably the only thing that the series could be criticized for is a loose treatment of courtroom procedure from time to time (but not consistently), but all in all, it actually does better with that than most legal dramas.

In 1920, there were 1,000,000 black farmers in the United States. Now there's only 45,000.

What happened?\

Black Farmer, Erin New York, 1940.  Already at the time of this photograph this farm was the only black owned farm in its area.

February has been declared to be Black History month.  I disregard most such declarations as most of them came after this one and they increasingly have come to mean less and less. Indeed, they've always had a strong political aspect to them, but this has grown to be more the case as they've moved on and the appeal to whatever cause is being given a month is less and less broad.  I don't feel this to be the case for Black History Month.

There are are few items up on this site that specifically relate to African American  heritage, most specifically the examination of the history of blacks in the military.  But I haven't looked at this topic, which is a really remarkable one.

Black farmers in Marshall, Texas, 1940.

For a long time, African Americans have represented about 10% of the U.S. population, but they were 14% of the farm population.  Now they're 2%.  That's a really remarkable decline.  What occured is a legitimate question.

It may particularly be one if we stop to realize that African American association with agriculture was particularly strong, if particularly unwilling, early on.  That is, almost all of the early African immigrants to North American were slaves, and almost all of them were slaves on farms with farming duties.

Indeed, that fact dominated both the early history of blacks in North America and agriculture in North America.  American agriculture rapidly split into two types, one being yeoman farms owned by families that consumed, as a rule, the bulk of their own production and sold the surplus and the second being production "plantations" that were driven for market sales.  A person who had the economic bent to history, perhaps a product of the University of Chicago or one of the members of the Marxist school of historical thought would tend to note, accordingly, that capitalism in American agriculture can be argued to have its roots in slavery, although that's drawing the point too fine and perhaps mischaracterising it.  Still, plantations were production agriculture, which produced their own consumables of all types on the side.  Regular farms, on the other hand, tended to be subsistence farms which sold their excess.  People could and did become rich as yeoman farmers, which is important to note, and oddly enough planters, i.e., those who owned plantations, were usually so heavily in debt that their debts exceeded their assets.  On a day to day basis, however, a planter was more likely to live the life of the genteel than any yeoman was, while the nature of the labor on the respective agricultural units were much more grueling for the actual laborers on a plantation.

It'd be temping just to write the history of blacks in American farming from there, but that would be inaccurate.  Black slaves on southern farms principally learned farming as a trade and, moreover, they learned a lot about farming that an average yeoman wouldn't.  Typical yeoman farms were multi production units driven towards family consumption and the finishing of a product was only partially market oriented.  Yeomanry learned an incredibly diverse set of skills, but they weren't as diverse as those that existed on a plantation.  For one thing, given the nature of plantations, they included subsistence farming in addition to production farming as the slaves were expected to feed themselves and their owners.  Indeed, while rarely noted, slaves were typically lightly armed by their owners so that they could supplement their tables with small game, which saved the owner from having to slaughter production animals for their sake.  Given all of this, slaves learned, by force of course, the same skills that yeomanry did in subsistence farming, but also learned production farming and for that matter the finishing of many agricultural products that plantations generated.  In other words, the typical southern slave at the time of the American Revolution learned how to grow food plants, such as yams, onions and the like, but also learned how to harvest and mill grain, brew beer, harvest, cultivate, dry and process tobacco.  Only that latter crop, at that time, was a production crop.  In later years, of course, cotton would be added, which wasn't processed locally, and which is a legendarily back breaking crop to cultivate and harvest.  Indeed, the labor is so great that it was cotton that kept American slavery from passing away in the early 19th Century and which accordingly lead to the Civil War.

Anyhow, with that background its tempting to suppose that as soon ast he Union Army came through that slaves took off for the North, but they didn't.  The United States was overwhelmingly agricultural in the 1860s and yeomanry was every bit the factor in the North that it was in the South. The real difference was that in the South the  yeoman class, which made up the overwhelming majority of hte population, was poorer than it was in the North, which was itself a byproduct of slavery.

Freed slaves wanted to become freeholders.  The dream of early liberated slaves was to own "40 acres and a mule", the American Agrarian equivalent of Chesterton's later Distributist "3 acres and a cow".  40 acres of land meant freedom and self sufficiency and the American black population, cultivating American ground since 1619, was well aware of that.  The Radical Republican thought was to bust up the plantations and distribute the ground, Emiliano Zapata style, to those who worked it.

It should have been done.

The fact that it wasn't done provides the beginning of the answer to the question posed above.  African Americans were overwhelmingly farmers in 1865 and they lacked the means to purchase farms or move for the most part. Some who had them moved, and already by the late 1860s black cowboys, recently freed men who had driven cattle in the forests of the south, were a prominent feature in Western ranching.  But the fact of the matter was that for the most part blacks couldn't purchase ground.  They had to hire themselves out, and in hiring themselves out, they were guaranteed to be required to work for the lowest wages possible, often in conditions that mimicked slavery.

Over time, those who could did purchase ground and many became tenant farmers, or sharecroppers.  Black sharecroppers became a major feature of the South, but in fairness black farmers did as well.  They were always outnumbered by white farmers to be sure, but they were a definite presence throughout the South and even spread into other regions.  The  number of acres owned by black farmers in the United States was 3,000,000 acres. By 1900, it was 12,000,000.

After 1890, however, some significant changes in the US began that would reverse the trend.  By 1890 the nation's transportation infrastructure had advanced to where moving long distance had become much easier.  At the same time the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s had caused blacks to steadily lose rights in the South after that time on a year by year basis.  By the 1890s it was becoming very notable and the first strong efforts to push back started to occur.  Those early efforts weren't successful however and African Americans simply began to pull up stakes and move from Southern farms to northern cities.

Map showing concentration of African American population in the United States in 1900.

What began as a trickle in in the 1890s expanded to a flood in the mid 1910s.  As a black population base formed in northern cities, African Americans who were sick of the prejudice and poverty they faced in the South left for the north and left agriculture behind them.  The process continued on all the way into the 1970s.

As this occurred, the relief laws of the Great Depression came into and accelerated the decline in black farming.  Much Southern farm land remained owned by descendants of the planter class who leased it out to black sharecroppers.  In an effort to arrest the deflation of agricultural products the US government encouraged farmers to plow crops under and idle land giving no thought to the fact that, in much of the South, the land being idled was farmed by one person and owned by another.  Planters participated in the Government' idling of their land and benefited economically by doing so. Sharecroppers simply lost their livelihoods.

Combined with all of this is the decline in the number of farmers in general, something American society, which is welded to the concept of market forces being benighted, has done nothing to arrest.

The overall result has been a sort of tragedy, particularly if you regard farming as having a special merit in and of itself, as we do.  Beyond that, which we won't go into but which is part of the mysticism of the agrarian ideal, African American culture had particularly strong roots in agriculture, with not all of those roots being exclusively one of oppression.  Even well into the Great Migration much of the odds and ends of African American culture in the United States, from food to music, had really deep agricultural roots.  That's effectively been lost with the loss of African Americans to farming.

The Long Slow Rise. Was Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two.

Some time ago I published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took R...: A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of ...

This came up elsewhere, where I also posted on it, and in doing that I looked up some of the statistics. They're pretty revealing.  I'll quote, but only in part, the item I was replying to, and then post my reply. That items was:

The post-War labor saving device boom did indeed allow a lot more women into the workforce.  There is also the additional problem of all those ‘Rosie the Riveter’ women were being forced out of the workforce by the returning servicemen.  They wanted their own jobs.

The reply.

It is true that women who worked in industry in World War Two wanted their own jobs, in at least some instances, but I think that story has been pretty heavily oversold and surprisingly the data doesn't really support a large wartime increase like we'd expect, although it does support an increase.  Female labor was heavily used in World War One as well and in some areas may have been more critical in WWI than it was in WWII.

You can find published examples of women who were reluctant to give up their jobs after the Great War, or who even attempted to hang on them nearly by force.  But by and large they pretty quickly reverted to pre war roles.  By the same token, while I've never seen figures on it, I think women who were employed in World War Two in industry had largely returned to pre war roles by some point in 1946.  It began to change after that.

Even at that, some of the statistics you can find are surprising and suggest that a lot of the way that this is now remembered is pretty heavily subject to myth.  In terms of just women working, the real boom is well after World War Two and the trend towards it started well before.

You an find varying data, but it's all pretty close, what it tends to show by decade is the following, with the categories being year, numbers (thousands) employed, percentage gainfully employed, and percentage of the workforce over age 16.

1900 5,319 18.8 % 18.3 %
1910 7,445 21.5         19.9
1920 8,637 21.4         20.4
1930 10,752 22.0         22.0
1940 12,845 25.4         24.3
1950 18,389 33.9         29.6
1960 23,240 37.7         33.4
1970 31,543 43.3         38.1
1980 45,487 51.5         42.5

This doesn't really take into account the spike in employment during either World War One or World War Two, which may be significant in that it tends to potentially be overemphasized.  Taken out, what we see is a slow increase from 1900 onward, which coincides with the rise of domestic implements.

If we figure in the years after 1980, it might be even more revealing.

1980 45,487 51.5     42.5
1990 56,829 57.5     45.2
1993 58,795 57.9     45.5
1994 60,239 58.8     46.0
1995 60,944 58.9     46.1
1996 61,857 59.3     46.2
1997 63,036 59.8     46.2
1998 63,714 59.8     46.3
1999 64,855 60.0     46.5
2000 66,303 60.2     46.6
2001 66,848 60.1     46.5
2002 67,363 59.8     46.5
2003 68,272 59.5     47.0
2004 68,421 59.2     46.0
2005 69,288 59.3     46.4
2006 70,000 59.4     46.0
2007 67,792 56.6     46.4
2008 71,767 59.5     44.0
2010 71,904 58.6     53.6 (which is another watershed year in that the majority of the                                                                     workforce became female and stayed that way)
2014 73,039 56.9     57.0

If we do all of that, we find that the number of women gainfully employed doesn't reach 50% at any point (including WWI and WWII) until 1980 and that it peaked for several years at 60% starting in 1999, before dropping down slightly.

If we also keep in mind that the 1930, 1940 and 1950 numbers we should keep in mind that the 1930 number and the 1940 number may have been artificially low due to the Great Depression.   In other words, we have to wonder if it was higher because of that (women taking jobs because men couldn't find work), or if the opposite was true (female employment artificially low due to lack of employment).  The general statistics curve would suggest it was a little lower than it should have been due to the Depression.  Having said that, my own mother and a couple of her sisters were employed in that period due to the Great Depression.  Their employment probably carried on into World War Two, but it was the Depression, not the war, that brought it about, which is always the way they themselves recalled it.

During the war the number of American women employed outside of the home went from 13.9% to 22.5%, which shows another element to this.  Lots of employed women were employed, but not "outside the home".  I'm not sure exactly how that was categorized, but even as late as World War Two a large number of women were regarded as not employed outside the home, while still gainfully employed.  It makes me wonder if domestic servants were categorized as employed inside the home, as large numbers of women were employed in that capacity.  If that's correct, it was still apparently the case during the war.  The number of women who were employed (which would include those employed inside of their own homes in some capacity) reached 37%, which is a large number and a big jump, but it also means that a lot of women were employed were in some classification that included being employed inside their own homes. The 10% or so jump in the figures represented millions of women, but it's not the impression that people tend to have today which would suggest that the majority of women were in the workforce.  In fact, the majority weren't.  This would also have been an increase in the Great Depression level of employment at 24.3%, but only by about 15% or so. Given the wartime emergency, and the end of the Great Depression, that's a much lower jump than we'd generally suppose.

It's also interesting to note that the wartime 37% figure wouldn't be reached again until 1960.  1960 was only fifteen years after World War Two, and therefore quite a few of the women in that workforce had been employed during the war (to include, again, my own mother).  But because it was a fifteen year gap, that also likely means that some of the women employed during the war had dropped out and returned to work by 1960.  It also, however, would reflect a lot of women entering the workforce who had been children during World War Two.

By 1950 33.9% of women were employed overall in the workforce, which is higher than at any point during the 1940s outside of World War Two.  But even that was only a 10% climb from the 30s.

Leaping back to the Great War, 20% of the war industry work force in the U.S. during World War One was female, a pretty big percentage.  I don't know what the overall percentage of women working in the U.S. workforce was during WWI, but that figure alone suggests it was pretty big.  If we consider that a lot of farm labor was simply left to women during the war it becomes more impressive.  30% of the German workforce during World War One was female, probably a much higher percentage than during WWII.  France was so denuded of men that women occupied all kinds of occupations.  Nearly anyone who has handled a long arm that was used by an American soldier in France during WWI is handling a weapon rebuilt by female labor in France following the war.

All that's a lot of blathering on my part, and I'm clearly proposing a revisionist history, but all in all, I think the data supports that 1) women were hugely important in the workforce in WWII; but 2) they also had been in WWI; and 3) female employment dropped really rapidly to immediate prewar levels following the wars (partially, no doubt, due to social pressures that were high, but higher in 1919 than in 1946);  but 4) those levels of employment were steadily increasing due to something other than workforce acclimation and had been rising since at least the 1890s. So the question then becomes, what caused that?

Probably a lot of things, to be sure, some of which I can suppose but will omit. But one definite factor, and I'd argue a much more significant factor, was the rise of domestic machinery.

So, if it seems like I'm suggesting that Maytag and Hoover may have had more to do with putting women in the workplace rather than the example of Rosie the Riveter, while an unpopular view, that's what the data suggests.

But what else might that data suggest, if we look at it carefully?

Well, as the person posting on the topic noted, quite correctly:

There weren’t a lot of fields open to women to work outside of the home, either.  School teacher, nurse or secretarial for the most part, were the majority of the jobs available to women.  Now you have women working as guards in men’s prisons.

So my further elaboration, or blabbering, follows, in this interesting topic.

I was going to come back and post on that after thinking about it, but I also don't think that the change there was brought about due to World War Two.

One thing the Rosie the Riveter type image sort of predisposes us to think is that women hadn't worked in heavy industry before World War One, and then after World War Two,t they stayed in it. But neither is true.

Whats definitely true is that women's occupational options were much more limited in prior times, but that seems to have started changing in real terms in the 1970s, although even there, there had been a slow change earlier in the 20th Century. 

Going into World War One women's occupational opportunities were really limited, which is part of the reason the statistics might reflect a large number of "inside the home" employed women, as they may have been domestics, one of the few fields open to them.  Other than that, teaching, like you mention, was an option, but not much beyond that. Secretarial roles, which later became a woman's field, wasn't open to them much at the time.  Store clerks, waitresses, and other occupations in that low paying arena were, together with some manufacturing such as clothing manufacturing, but it was pretty limited.  Given that, it's interesting that the number of women employed was as high as it was, and it was probably almost in low paying jobs as a rule.

World War One saw a big increase in women employed in heavy industry.  Here's one such example:

British factory worker, 1919.

Jobs like that no doubt paid a lot better than traditional women's roles, and lots of other examples can be found from that time frame and a lot of them are really surprising.  Lots of nurses, of course, but also lots of women drivers and women working in agriculture and timbering roles (both involving horses, linking back into our focus here).  After the war, however, employment in all those roles save for nursing dropped off.  Women really came into the Army, Navy and Marines in strength in telephone and secretarial roles as well, although they were mustered back out after the war.  In some isolated instances (including in Germany) women saw some use in law enforcement.

Between the wars women pretty much replaced men in the secretarial role. That had started prior to World War One, but as late as that time men occupied most secretarial roles.  The first female secretary to be employed by a U.S. Senator was one employed by Wyoming's Francis E. Warren, and that was just before World War One.  But by the 1920s women secretaries had not only become common, they dominated the field.

Anyhow, the industry jobs disappeared after the war. During the Second World War we get all the industrial occupations once again, but then again right after the war it dropped off again.

After World War Two women's fields were likely more open than they had been, but even then it was really several decades before women were commonly in most occupational areas.  While its only a movie, as sort of an example, the film The Deer Hunter was on the other day and I happened to watch it and it didn't strike me as odd that 100% of the iron workers in the film are men.  It was filmed in 1979, depicting 1973, I think, and it was right about that time that it was thought to be interesting to show a woman working in a blue collar job because it remained so unusual.  Locally the first women police officers and firemen came in right about 1980 or so and it was unusual enough that it wasn't really well thought of.  But that's 35 years after the Second World War. 

I think that too all points to something else going on, and what I think it is, is that the rise of domestic machinery made women surplus to domestic labor.  All of us here were born after the rise of domestic machinery and so we only have the recollections of our parents, who came up during the tail end of that rise.  My mother used to speak of the girls taking rugs out to hang on the line to be beat to clean them, something I've only seen on rare occasion but which seems to have been pretty common in the era she was speaking of.  More than one woman her age spoke about hanging out the laundry to dry to be a collective chore, and with big families, I'm sure it was.  Cooking took all day at the time as a lot of people didn't have modern stoves and both my father and my mother had some recollections of their mothers or grandmothers being involved in cooking on an average day nearly all day.  Indeed, my mother was a terrible cook as she'd learned from her mother who had never adjusted to a gas stove and who simply boiled everything endlessly if that was an option, that being pretty common when people had to cook on wood burning stoves.

All of that isn't very long ago, but if we look back, as late as the 1930s the majority of men didn't graduate from high school but went to work in their teens while still living at home.  If they left home, they lived in a boarding house.  Domestic labor was too difficult for people to really "live out on their own".  Army barracks of the old era (which more than one of us here have lived in) showed that, as collective living of the simple type was about as good as a group of men could manage, the same being reflected in bunkhouses on ranches.  Female labor tended to be heavily employed at home, and therefore out of the workforce, by necessity.

But once you don't have to haul rugs out to beat them but run a vacuum cleaner over them, and you don't have to have somebody cooking from around 5:00 a.m. through 5:00 p.m., and you don't have to buy food every other day as the ice box is now a refrigerator, things really change.  That probably reflected itself first in young women starting to attend college in large numbers (47% of college students in 1920 were female), showing that they weren't needed at home, followed by young women occupying new occupational fields, and then with the big increase in education following World War Two the opening up of many field to women starting in the 1970s.

Indeed, that probably does have a connection with World War Two, but it'd be oddly with the GI Bill, which benefited mostly men.  That opened up fields to men of entire demographics that were previously closed to them, and with the advance of domestic machinery freeing up young women from employment in that role, and in their getting education in other areas, the results came about by the 70s.

So where does all of this leave us?

Well, things have rather obviously changed for women in the work place, but the reasons for that aren't, it seems to me, what they might seem to be.  Rather, they're technological and economic.

All of this was addressed in the first post we linked into here, which is one of the better ones on this website.  And the social implications of that are enormous and play into a huge amount about how things developed, rather than how we believe they developed.  And that really matters.  But we've gotten it mostly wrong.

53,000

Appalachian coal miner, 1946. He's carrying a lunch pail.

That's the number of people employed in the coal industry and miners today.

There were 694,000 in 1919.  1919 was the peak year for coal mine employment in the United States.

In 1929 it was already down, to 602,000.

454,000 in 1939.  But of course that was in the Great Depression.

170,000 in 1959.

Put that way, the 53,000, in 2019, which is up slightly over the past year, is a pretty resilient figure. After all, in just the 20 years from 1939 to 1959 the industry suffered the loss of 280,000 jobs.

Still, that trajectory is remarkable.  And it's related to what we've noted previously.

In very human terms.

Poster Saturday: Back to work. . . back to school. . . back to books.

A Depression era poster promoting books, now that summer was over.

Poster Saturday: Jenny on the job; Eats man sized meals.

Jenny on the Job was a World War Two series of work posters aimed at women who hadn't occupied industrial jobs prior to the war.

A poster like this reveals more about the era, to an informed viewer, than we might at first suspect suppose.

To start with its important to know that women had in fact worked in industrial occupations during wartime before.  The idea that this was a novelty during World War Two is completely erroneous.  Women were employed in large numbers in industry during World War One and it may be argued that they were at least as important, and even perhaps more important, in the First World War in that capacity as compared to the Second.  So why would any sort of reminder about how to eat be necessary?

As we've discussed here previously, a huge change that started occurring between the wars, but which was retarded because of the Great Depression, was the introduction of domestic machinery.  It was really that change that brought about the massive change in the role of women in regards to work that occurred after the Second World War, not World War Two itself.  The real impact of the Second World War, in regards to this evolution, was to cause of a massive boost in consumer spending when the war ended, which prevented the resumption of the Depression and which brought in over twenty years of development in domestic machinery nearly over night.

Okay, so what's that have to do with this poster?

Well, while the war did put an end to the Depression with finality, and the post war spending spree brought in floods of domestic machinery into the household, greatly reducing the labor that had been associated with maintaining a household almost overnight, some of this change had started to come in, slowly, after the Great War.  As we've also noted, World War One did cause a leap in technological advancement that saw a lot of technologies that were coming into their own prior to the war really advance during it.  Domestic machinery wasn't really part of that but what did occur was a social development that is somewhat associated with technology that had a direct impact on women and young men, introducing for the first time the concept of a sort of late teenage, early 20s, youth period in which individuals of that age weren't immediately burdened with adult responsibilities.  That really came into the forefront in the 1920s, but it was also heavily arrested by the Great Depression.

Be that as it may, these small beginnings were enough of beginnings that by the 1930s not all American women were as fully dedicated on a daily basis to heavy domestic labor as they once were. We can't go too far with this, but we can say that this was occurring.  So really for the first time we start to have middle class women, and for that matter a significant number of middle class men, whose daily tasks were not as physically demanding as they only recently had been.  And that sort of introduces the modern era, in a very early way, of appearance.

If we think of it, particularly in the case of women, we'll note that fashions, as we've already addressed, for women have always changed exceedingly rapidly, but we'll also note that its really the 1930s when women's fashion's begin to be recognizable to us.  This isn't to say that if a woman wore a typical daily wear type dress from the 1930s today it wouldn't look odd, it would. But if a woman wore a dress from the 1920s, she'd appear to be in costume as opposed to attempting to affect a bit of an old fashioned look.

With this a sort of modern standard of female beauty, roughly speaking, also started to come in.  This is so much the case that the pinup girl of the 1940s really remains with us and on odd occasion you'll see people still attempting to duplicate that appearance in artistic depictions of one kind or another.  Perhaps most oddly, 1940s and 1950s style pinup girls, which are not the same, show up quite a bit in modern tattoos including tattoos sported by women. That's a sort of homage to the appearance standards of the 40s and 50s in a really odd way, as by those standards of course a woman would never have been tattooed.

Anyhow, as part of all of this, including the move by large numbers of people from rural life into town life, we started to see the introduction of an era when eating, and in particular eating lunch, wasn't what it was.  Farm workers had typically eaten three large meals a day, and on a lot of farms and ranches they still do.  Industrial laborers had up until the 1920s typically walked to work carrying their lunch . . and their tools, and they also consumed three pretty substantial sized meals.  But office workers usually didn't do that, i.e., eat three big meals, and if they did, they'd soon find themselves gaining a substantial amount of weight.  So in came light lunches, by the standards of the day.

When the war came in, a lot of people found themselves in industrial occupations that were unlike they work they'd done before.  This included a lot of young women who had no doubt worked in at least their parents' homes, but who may not have done any kind of really routine heavy labor.  By 1940 these new workers were used to what was becoming or had become the new American standard, which for many of them meant a very simple cereal based breakfast and a really light lunch.  It didn't provide enough caloric intake for industrial occupations that still involved a lot of heavy labor.

Hence the poster.