Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming

Probably the most revealing thing in the article:

The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”

In other words, they're carpetbaggers.

Wyoming has always had a very high transient population.  Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region.  Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't.  Joseph M. Carey wasn't.  A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day.  Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian.  Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.

This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here.  You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here.  If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different.  Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.  

But earlier arrivals did try.  They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.

The recent arrivals don't.  They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.

They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.

Or were.

Recently, however, something else has been going on.  Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them.  One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin.  They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.

Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it.  Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.  

Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.

The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.

No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.

Populist do, as they're ignorant.

Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone".  The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level.  Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States.  You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners.  When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran).  I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school.  There was one Jehovah's Witness.  In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest.  By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister.  But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.

I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value.  It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves.  People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.

And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.

Now, that's being fought over.

The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.

Wednesday, Februay 6, 1924. Two Deaths.

Woodrow Wilson was laid to rest in a vault beneath the center isle of the chapel of the Washington National Cathedral, making him the only U.S. President to be buried in Washington, D.C.

There were protests outside the German Embassy due to the legation refusing to offer condolences for the death of the late President.  It also refused, at first, to fly its flag at half staff.

Later that day it relented and the flag was at half staff.

Easter Sunday, April 12, 1914. Rumblings of revolution.

The IWW was meeting in New York City, and had a large gathering in Union Square.  The theme of "bread and revolution" obviously had come up.

In Russia, where Easter Sunday was still a week a way, Czar Nicholas II, who would very soon be facing protests by those seeking "bread and revolution", presented the now famous Mosic Fabrege egg, created by Albert Holmström under the supervision of Peter Carl Fabergé, to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, as well as giving his mother Maria Feodorovna another one which became known as the Catherine the Great egg.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the opening of the Cabrillo Bridge in San Diego.

A convention in Hot Springs, Arkansas which established  the Pentecostal Assemblies of God branch of Protestantism adjourned. It is now the largest branch of Pentecostalism.

Charles Crupelandt won the 19th Paris–Roubaix tour.

Governor Carey was in an argument.

Last prior edition:

Good Friday, April 10, 1914. Villa takes San Pedro.

1910s, 1914, Good Friday, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Pancho Villa

The Mustachioed Era

It can no longer be ignored.

 

 Wyoming Territorial Governor John A. Campbell.

Something was going on with facial hair in the late 19th and early 20th Century.  And on a massive scale.

In addition to this blog, and my others, I try to catalog Wyoming's history on a daily basis with my Today In Wyoming's History blog.  This being November, I've been running a lot of items on various politicians being elected or appointed, including a lot of them in the 1865 to 1920 time frame. And the evidence is overwhelming.  In order to be anything in that time frame, business wise or politically, you had to have some serious mustache action going on.

 

George A. Baxter.  It probably took him longer to grow that mustache and cookie duster than he served as Territorial Governor.  Note also the starched upright collar, a type of dress style thankfully now more or less gone.

Francis E. Warren, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from the Civil War and and one of the longest serving Senators in Senate history.  And also father in law to General John J. Pershing.  The Wyoming politician had this serious mustache his entire political career, including the point in time when this photo was taken, after the passing of the Great Mustache Era.

Clarence Clark, long serving but forgotten mustachioed Wyoming Congressman.

James Weaver, a surprisingly successful candidate for President on the Populist ticket, who went right from the Huge Beard Era to the Giant Mustache Era.

Now, it so happens that I happen to have a mustache myself, but nothing like the gigantic mustaches so popular in the this era.  These mustaches are practically their own species of mustache, bearing a faint resemblance to current mustaches the way that giant animals of the Pleistocene bear a relationship to their smaller cousins today.

How did this occur?  It's hard to say. We can tell, of course, that just prior to the Giant Mustache Era there was a Giant Beard Era.

 

Territorial Governor Moonlight, who'd been a Civil War era general before being appointed Territorial Governor of Wyoming.

Enormous beards seem to have come in during the Civil War.  Perhaps everyone was too busy fighting to shave.  

 

 Rutherford B. Hayes, whose mouth has completely disappeared from view due to his beard.

Mustaches, however, started to dominate in the late 19th Century.  No idea why.  And not only mustaches, but the super sized mustache, such as that sported by Theodore Roosevelt.

Zachery Taylor.  Apparently razors were in use when he was President, but combs clear were not.

Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the big mustache when was a rancher.

Roosevelt cultivated a thin, very well groomed mustache, until he went to the Dakotas to ranch. At that time, the busy stache was already in vogue in the West.  I've heard it claimed that the reason for this is that it keeps the lip from sunburning.  Perhaps.  At any rate, bug mustaches remain pretty common amongst ranchers and cowboys today, so perhaps there's something to it.  And perhaps Roosevelt's adoption of the style helped popularize what was already a growing trend at the time.

 Goatee pioneer Governor Carey.  Was Carey a proto-hipster?

And it wasn't just in the United States.  It was a global trend.  South of the border, Mexican revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa both sported some serious mustaches.  Lord Kitchener, the legendary British Field Marshall did as well.

 Even now, Lord Kitchener's command is compelling.  The mustache the reason?

Frankly, based upon the photographic evidence, I doubt a man prior to 1914 or so could expect to be a success without a serious mustache.  Just look at William Jennings Bryan, for example.  Universally regarded as brilliant, he just couldn't get himself elected President. And he didn't amount to a great Secretary of State when appointed by the equally clean shaven Woodrow Wilson, a President who couldn't persuade Congress to approve the Versailles Treaty.  Perhaps it was the lack of a mustache that left the Senate lukewarm about the entire deal.

 Writer Owen Wister.  He didn't go into law like his father had hoped, but the sensitive writer had to be taken seriously in print, with a mustache like that.

Well, this leads us to an obvious conclusion.  In this season of seemingly ongoing political confusion and strife we're left wanting for character in our leaders.  Gen. Petraeaus engages in activity that brings him down.  Even many Republicans and Democrats are less than enthusiastic about their recent candidates, Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama.  Clearly something is missing.  And that something must be the serious mustache that obviously instilled moral fiber and character in an earlier stalwart generation. 

All photographs from our Flickr site.