Saturday, April 5, 1924. Fighting the KKK in Lilly.

We haven't featured one for awhile, as they haven't been great, but on this day, The Country Gentleman restored the dignity of magazine cover art with a spring theme.

The Ku Klux Klan shot 22 people in Lilly, Pennsylvania, killing two.  The gunfire was sort of the equivalent of a drive by shooting, with the KKK shooting randomly into the town's railroad station after some townsmen, miner workers who were heavily immigrants from Eastern Europe, had "played a stream of water from the town fire hose upon the visitors(KKK) as they were marching back to the station." 

The KKK was in Lilly for one of their ceremonies in a local field and was returning to the station for transport to Johnstown, PA.  They did catch the train, and upon arrival at Johnstown they were met with 50 policemen who arrested 25 Klansman and confiscated 50 firearms.  The next day, an additional four residents of Lilly were arrested. Twenty-nine people were charged with murder.

Lilly was a mining town, and like most of them it had a strong contingent of Catholic and Orthodox miners, members of ethnicities that the Klan didn't like. A strong UMW union town, the residents weren't cowed by the KKK.  A monument to their efforts has been placed in the town in recent years.

Locally, there were concerns about spring floods. And the flight around the globe was suffering delays.

And the accusations against the former Attorney General Daugherty were getting bizarre.

Last prior edition:

Friday, April 4, 1924. Wolves in Albany County.

1920s, 1924, 2020, 2020s, 2024, Animals, baseball, Crime, Prohibition, The Roaring Twenties, Wolves

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 63d Edition. Strange Bedfellows.

 

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The environmental populists?

Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.  But how strange, nonetheless still surprises.

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who rose to that position by pitching to the populist far right, which dominates the politics of the GOP right now, and which appears to be on the verge of bringing the party down nationally, has tacked in the wind in a very surprising direction.  He appeared this past week at a meeting in Natrona County to oppose a proposed gravel pit project at the foot of Casper Mountain.  He actually pitched for the upset residents in the area to mobilize and take their fight to Cheyenne, stating:

We have a very delicate ecosystem, the fragility up there, the fragility of the flows … the proximity to domestic water uses. All of those things should have led to a distinct treatment by the Office of State Lands, and that did not happen.

I am, frankly, stunned.  

I frankly never really expected Mr. Gray to darken visage of the Pole Stripper monument on the east side of Casper's gateway, which you pass by on the road in from Cheyenne again, as he's not from here and doesn't really have a very strong connection to the state, although in fairness that connection would have been to Casper, where he was employed by his father's radio station and where he apparently spent the summers growing up (in an unhappy state of mind, according to one interview of somebody who knew him then).  Gray pretty obviously always had a political career in mind and campaigned from the hard populist right from day one, attempting at first to displace a conservative house member unsuccessfully.

We have a post coming up which deals with the nature of populism, and how it in fact isn't conservatism.  Gray was part of the populist rise in the GOP, even though his background would more naturally have put him in the conservative camp, not the populist one.  But opportunity was found with populists, who now control the GOP state organization.  The hallmark of populism, as we'll explore elsewhere, is a belief in the "wisdom of the people", which is its major failing, and why it tends to be heavily anti-scientific and very strongly vested in occupations that people are used to, but which are undergoing massive stress.  In Wyoming that's expressed itself with a diehard attitude that nothing is going on with the climate and that fossil fuels will be, must have, and are going to dominate the state's economy forever.   The months leading up to the recent legislative session, and the legislative session itself, demonstrated this with Governor Gordon taking criticism for supporting anything to address carbon concerns.  Put fairly bluntly, because a large percentage of Wyoming's rank and file workers depend on the oil and gas industry, and things related to it, any questioning on anything tends to be taken as an attack on "the people".

Natrona County has had a gravel supply problem for quite a while and what the potential miner seeks to do here is basically, through the way our economy works, address it.  There would be every reason to suspect that all of the state's politicians who ran to the far right would support this, and strongly.  But they aren't.

The fact that Gray is not, and is citing environmental concerns, comes as a huge surprise.  But as noted, given his background, he's probably considerably more conservative than populist, but has acted as politicians do, and taken aid and comfort where it was offered.  Tara Nethercott ran as a conservative and lost for the same office.

But here's the thing.

That gravel is exactly the sort of thing that populists, if they're true to what they maintain they stand for, ought to support.  It's good for industry, and the only reason to oppose the mining is that 1) it's in a bad place in terms of the neighbors and 2) legitimate environmental concerns, if there are any.  But that's exactly the point.  You really can't demand that the old ways carry on, until they're in your backyard.  

Truth be known, given their nature, a lot of big environmental concerns are in everyone's backyard right now.

The old GOP would have recognized that nationally, and wouldn't be spending all sorts of time back in DC complaining about electric vehicles.  And if people are comfortable with things being destructive elsewhere, they ought to be comfortable with them being destructive right here.  If we aren't, we ought to be pretty careful about it everywhere.

There actually is some precedent for this, FWIW.  A hallmark of Appalachian populism was the lamenting of what had happened to their region due to coal mining.  John Prine's "Paradise" in some ways could be an environmental populist anthem.

Hard to feel sorry.

Far right goofball Candace Owens was fired from the Daily Wire. She stated that she "cannot be silenced", but frankly the gadfly has gone from sort of being a token black populist to a has been already.

That no doubt sounds extremely harsh, but frankly it's true. Owens went from being sort of a snarky populist commenter to writing some real wack job stuff, at which time her popularity dropped off.  Part of her popularity was because she was black, and we don't think of populists being African American, although some are.  Once again, black conservatives and black populists are not the same thing.  Her status as a rare black populist, and a highly attractive woman at that, didn't hurt in her getting attention. 

I don't know what her fan base is, but this is all a sort of tragedy.  Always abrasive and controversial, her early commentary was not completely without merit.  She's really dropped off in the recent year or years and probably won't really revive.  She's sort of like Tucker Carlson that way, being a person of obvious high intelligence who really went down a rabbit hole.  Carlson looked like a complete fool with his recent trip to Russia. We hope that Owens has a legitimate conservative revival, or at least isn't touring North Korea to get a one up on Carlson.

The Dead Elephants.

There was an Irish street gang in New York at one time that bore the name The Dead Rabbits.  The House GOP is rapidly becoming The Dead Elephants.

Something is really going on.

Filled with disgust, some Republicans in the House are abandoning the House well before their terms are up. In doing that, they're setting themselves free from something. That something might just be failure, but at this rate, it suggests something else.  They almost seem set on sabotaging their party, except their party isn't a party.

In 1944 when it became obvious to those who cared to see, and many simply did not, that Germany was going down in defeat, not only did conservative German army officers but a few, albeit very few, members of the SS began to plot against him.  It's notable that the cover the July 20 bombing was given was that it was an attempted assassination by the SS.  At least one member of the SS was actually part of the plot, and the head of the Berlin police was far from a liberal democrat.  Right at the end of the war Himmler was conspiring against Hitler and notably didn't take a place among the suicides at the bunker.

The point is that when people who have been part of a movement begin bailing out, they sense defeat and don't want to be associated with it.

An added point is that with Donald Trump the effective Speaker of the House, and Marjorie Taylor Green acting as the Howler Monkey Sergeant at Arms, Trump's destructiveness has reached a new level.  Republicans lost the Oval Office in 2020 and the Senate in 2022.  Their House representation declined to perilous levels in the same time period. They were supposed to do well throughout it.  Now, not only is Trump causing the GOP to lose at the ballot box, he's causing Republicans to abandon their posts. 

In only one more Republicans leaves, the House will be deadlocked and Mike Johnson out the door.  If two leave, the Democrats are in control.  There will be replacements, but there's no guarantee that they'll be Republicans.

The Conservatives v. The Populists

While, once again, we'll have more on this later, we'll note here that the primary race in the state this year is really shaping up to be a fight between two parties, the Conservatives and the Populists, all of whom register as Republicans.  

Some Conservatives have registered to try to displace Populists, and some Populists are doing the same in regard to Conservatives.  Of note, the importation of out of state Populists is becoming really obvious, that having been a barely noticed aspect of it until very recently.

Populists are going to be howling that their Republican contenders are "RINO"s in short order, when in fact it's really the other way around, and the Populists are a sort of Neo Dixiecrat.  Republicans are late in rising to their challenge, but they are doing it.  

The primary may be quite interesting.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 62nd Edition. The trowel and musket edition.

Apostolic Christianity, Catholic, Donald Trump, Education, homosexuality, Israeli Hamas War, law, Mormon, Pope Francis, religion, Sex, theology, Zeitgeist

Sunday, March 9, 1924. Disaster in Utah, Oil and War.

The French Cabinet held an emergency session over the collapsing franc.

Dangerous "boy gangs" were cruising Denver, according to the Rocky Mountain News.

Last Prior:

Saturday, March 8, 1924. The Castle Gate Disaster.

Monday, December 3, 1923. Congress Convenes In Spectacular Fight; Bitter Battle Marks Failure In Voting For House Speaker, a child actor, and a Napoleonic drama.

Headline ripped, um, right from yesterday?

Well, at least an orange haired tycoon associated with dubiousity wasn't involved.

Seven coal miners at the Nunnery Colliery in the United Kingdom were killed when a rope hauling a mine transport severed.

Interestingly, at least to me, an elevator cable severed in an elevator I was riding in last week. It was retroactively horrifying, but not like this.

Released on this date in 1923.  It was the first film to feature Peggy-Jean Montgomery, aka "Baby Peggy".

She died at age 101 in 2020, being the last person with a substantial career in the silent film industry.  She struggled in later years to disassociate herself from her childhood role, which brought her derision from other in the industry.  She became a successful author, and was a convert to Catholicism.

Published on this date:

It was, as noted, a Napoleonic era drama.

Monday, October 8, 2023. New disasters

New disasters finally pushed the Cole Creek railroad disaster off the front page of the local paper.

And the trial of the Sheriff's deputy who killed a woman for failure to dim her lights had come up.

Sunday, October 7, 1923. Midwest Mine Explosion, Grand Junction Colorado.

From one disaster to another:

Mine Explosion Snuffs Out Six Workers’ Lives

Nevada State Journal, Reno

October 8, 1923

Grand Junction, Colo., Oct. 7. -- An explosion of gas in the Midwest Coal Mine at Palisades, Colo., at 11 a.m. today killed six of the seven men working in the mine.

The dead are:

Robert P. Scott, manager

J. K. Keys and three sons, Harvey Keys, W. B. Keys and Robert T. Keys

George McKee

McKee had entered the service of the company today, and this was his first shift.

The government mine rescue crews that were fighting the fire in the Bookcliff Mine arrived an hour after the explosion, and located four bodies.

Jim Benda, the other miner in the workings at the time of the explosions, was badly burned. He crawled three quarters of a mile through the smoke and gas to safety. It is said that he will recover.

The usual force at the Midwest mine is 40 men, but only a short clean-up crew was at work today. Superintendent Scott had entered the mine on an inspection trip.

The explosion wrecked the mine badly, it is said. The mine entry is far up on the side of Grand Mesa above Palisades.

Three members of the government rescue crew attempting to recover bodies from the Midwest mine were so overcome by the smoke and gas, despite the helmets, that their companions had to carry them from the workings.  All of the bodies except those of Robert P. Scott and W. B. Keys were recovered tonight and it was announced that no further efforts will be made to recover them until morning, when it is hoped that some of the gas and smoke will have cleared away.

It is now believed that the mine did not take fire but that the smoke was from the explosion.

The body of George McKee was the first to be recovered. He was found among wreckage of cars which had been started down grade toward the portal by the force of the explosion.

The string of cars hit his body and were derailed by it. He was mangled by the cars. The bodies of J. K. Keys and one of his sons were found close to the air shaft which was wrecked by the blast. The younger men had been blown against one of the mine timbers with such force as to crush his body.

The great exhaust fan at the top of the airshaft on the surface was blown from its foundation and hurled down the hill.

And:

 

Tuesday, August 14, 1923. The Kemmerer Mine Explosion.

Today In Wyoming's History: August 14: 1923  An explosion at the Frontier Mine in Kemmerer killed 99 people. 

The explosion was caused, it is believed, by a fire boss attempting to relight his flame on a safety lamp by striking a match.

The death toll was smaller than initially feared due to quite a few workers being out for vacation.

The British Marine Air Navigation Co. Ltd. commenced the world's first flying boat passenger service.  The flight was from Woolston, Southampton to the Channel Islands.

Martial law was declared in Tulsa due to a KKK murder of an accused drug peddlar.

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XII. Holding back the tide.

February 14, 2023

Freshman Congressman Harriet Hageman introduced the companion bill to a doomed bill introduced in the Senate by Cynthia Lummis, which provides:

117th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 543

To prohibit the President from issuing moratoria on leasing and permitting energy and minerals on certain Federal land, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 28, 2021

Ms. Herrell (for herself, Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Scalise, Mr. Westerman, Mr. Gosar, Mr. Newhouse, Mr. Moore of Utah, Mr. Crawford, Mr. Young, Mr. Owens, Mr. McKinley, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Brady, Mr. Stauber, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Tiffany, Mr. LaMalfa, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Lamborn, Mr. McClintock, Mr. Roy, Mr. Smith of Nebraska, Mr. Reschenthaler, Mr. Calvert, Mrs. Bice of Oklahoma, Mr. Baird, Mr. Mooney, Mr. Rosendale, Mr. Hern, Mrs. Boebert, and Mr. Amodei) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Natural Resources, and in addition to the Committee on Agriculture, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To prohibit the President from issuing moratoria on leasing and permitting energy and minerals on certain Federal land, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Protecting Our Wealth of Energy Resources Act” or the “POWER Act”.

SEC. 2. PROHIBITION ON MORATORIA OF NEW ENERGY LEASES ON CERTAIN FEDERAL LAND AND ON WITHDRAWAL OF FEDERAL LAND FROM ENERGY DEVELOPMENT.

(a) Definitions.—In this section:

(1) CRITICAL MINERAL.—The term “critical mineral” means any mineral included on the list of critical minerals published in the notice of the Secretary of the Interior entitled “Final List of Critical Minerals 2018” (83 Fed. Reg. 23295 (May 18, 2018)).

(2) FEDERAL LAND.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—The term “Federal land” means—

(i) National Forest System land;

(ii) public lands (as defined in section 103 of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (43 U.S.C. 1702));

(iii) the outer Continental Shelf (as defined in section 2 of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (43 U.S.C. 1331)); and

(iv) land managed by the Secretary of Energy.

(B) INCLUSION.—The term “Federal land” includes land described in clauses (i) through (iv) of subparagraph (A) for which the rights to the surface estate or subsurface estate are owned by a non-Federal entity.

(3) PRESIDENT.—The term “President” means the President or any designee, including—

(A) the Secretary of Agriculture;

(B) the Secretary of Energy; and

(C) the Secretary of the Interior.

(b) Prohibitions.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President shall not carry out any action that would prohibit or substantially delay the issuance of any of the following on Federal land, unless such an action has been authorized by an Act of Congress:

(A) New oil and gas leases, drill permits, approvals, or authorizations.

(B) New coal leases, permits, approvals, or authorizations.

(C) New hard rock leases, permits, approvals, or authorizations.

(D) New critical minerals leases, permits, approvals, or authorizations.

(2) PROHIBITION ON WITHDRAWAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President shall not withdraw any Federal land from forms of entry, appropriation, or disposal under the public land laws, location, entry, and patent under the mining laws, or disposition under laws pertaining to mineral and geothermal leasing or mineral materials unless the withdrawal has been authorized by an Act of Congress.

1. Can't pass the Senate

2.  Would be vetoed if it actually passed both houses, when there's certainly not enough votes to override a veto.

So why do these things?

February 20, 2023

Golden moves on path to all-electric in new buildings: To meet its #climate goals, this #Colorado city of 20,000 needs to crimp #methane combustion. It could require all-electric in new buildings by January 2024

February 23, 2023

SNAP, the Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, ends this month.

NPR is laying off 10% of its workforce.

March 3, 2023

A Gold and Copper mine will open in Laramie County in 2025.

The United States Post Office is buying 9,250 electric vans from Ford.

March 13, 2023

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed Friday after a comment by a major investment broker regarding it.  The Federal Government is not going to "bail out" the bank, which has accounts by many wealthy investors.

President Biden is proceeding to authorize the Willow drilling project inside the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, despite protests over the proposed action.

March 28, 2023

Renewables produced more energy than coal last year.

Coal checked in at 20%, down from 50% in 2007, and it's declining.

This is no surprise here, we've noted the timeline of coal long ago:

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

April 2, 2023

It's the end of coal in the state.

Rocky Mountain Power has announced that nine of its eleven power plants will be using gas, rather than coal, by 2030.

And, once again:

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

As is to emphasize it, one of the remaining coal-fired plants will be Glenrock's Dave Johnson, where a third wind generating facility is going in.

April 3, 2023

Saudi Arabia and Dubai, and other OPEC countries, are cutting back oil production through the balance of the year.

April 13, 2023

The Biden Administration's proposed emissions standards will require 2/3s of all automobiles to be electric by 2032.

April 25, 2023

Fly Casper Alliance lobbies for city subsidy.

A new Natrona County Advocacy Group, Fly Casper Alliance, is seeking $50,000 from the City of Casper to help secure the present Delta (Sky West) flight to Salt Lake City.  The flight already receives subsidies from Natrona County, but this one time payment is hoped to help continue to secure the flight.

Related thread:

Delta receives a subsidty to continue serving the Natrona County International Airport

May 10, 2023

The big economic news right now, of course, is that the country is racing towards its debt limit, at which point it will default on its debts.

The whole idea of a debt limit was to put a cap on Congress' ability to borrow too much money. The problem is it didn't work out that way.  Sort of like a spending limit on a credit card, it just caps off the debt, but the problem is, unlike a credit card, when you go to present it to the person you are buying something from, your credit isn't declined.  You get the thing anyway, and then later just don't have the ability to pay for it.

So it works instead, like buying a house, for example, or a car, you couldn't afford.

In order to really have teeth, there'd have to be a third body, like the CBO, treasury, or something, that would just nullify bills authorizing spending over the limit.  Or, rather, a court would have to declare, before things were spent, that there was a freeze on spending as Congress didn't have the statutory authority to make the spending.  

A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, frankly, would work significantly better.

It does serve to cause the spending entities to have to get together, but they don't do it honestly.  Basically what we have going on is something akin to a couple at a banquet who have overspent arguing whether they should take the Bud Light off the table, while they're leaving the Dom Pérignon on.  Or, rather, it's like a husband that has a job as Mini Mart clerks, but the education of PhDs, arguing about racking up bills rather than going out and getting a better paying job.

If we don't get this fixed by June 1, the country is going into a massive economic crisis.

To add to that grim situation, the negotiations are in the hands of 1) one politician who is so old that he can recall when he went to U.S. Grant's kindergarten recitals, and 2) one politician who is so beholding to Trumpist "Club For Growth" Kool-Aid drinkers that he stinks up a room before he gets there.

If you worked at a company run this way, you'd look for a new job.  If you lived in a family run this way, you'd be looking for your own apartment.

This also serves, we might note, to recall the Jeffersonian warnings about democracy (and yes, we are a democracy, don't give me that "but we're a republic" crap, which is just what that line is, crap).  Jefferson warned that once the country ceased to be agrarian, the government would fail, as at that point it gave rise to feeding the mob.

The history of modern democracies has so far demonstrated that fear to be wrong, but it has also taken real crises in order to address largess.  The German democracy, for instance, beat up by the hyperinflation of Weimar era and the brutality of World War Two keeps a tight reign on its finances. The Japanese democracy, hit hard by the Japanese decline of the 1970s, does the same.

So far, the American democracy has shown no such tendency.  Congress won't address entitlements, which it must, won't address gigantic defense spending, which it must, and won't address raising taxes, which it must.

In that context, again, it's like a couple employed as Mini Mart clerks, both with PhD's, who are standing outside their apartment yelling each at each other about whether to upgrade the stereo on the Tesla they can't afford.

May 13, 2023

Mining sector jobs grew more than any other sector of Wyoming's economy last year, by 9.1%. This in spite of dire warnings by, well, folks like me.

UW's employees will be receiving a pay raise.

Ford Motors will no longer put AM radio in its vehicles.  Any of them.  Many other manufacturers are pulling theirs from electric vehicles.

May 15, 2023

Trump apparently said in his Town Hall on CNN that unless the Administration agreed to major cuts, the Republicans should take the country into debt default, a totally wreckless position that would destroy the savings of his constituency. 

Trump himself was responsible for major additions to the deficit.

Biden and the Republicans are set to meet again on Tuesday. Perhaps this slow motion process is part of his strategy, but its yet another example of government that is as slow as molasses.

May 16, 2023

The local paper is eliminating an edition, going to three print editions per week only and wiping out personal home delivery in favor of mail.

May 21, 2023

Nothing is being done about the debt ceiling while President Biden is at the G7. He gets back today.

If the US ends up with Trump again, this sort of behavior will be a lot of the reason why.

Footnotes:

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XI. The Waiting for a Train Edition

Saturday, February 27, 1943. Mining disaster in Montana.

"Freedom of Worship", the second in Rockwell's four freedoms illustrations, ran in the Saturday Evening Post along with an essay on the topic by Will Durant.

An explosion and resulting carbon monoxide poisoning killed 74 minders in Montana's Smith Mine No. 3.  The horrible incident remains Montana's worst mining disaster.

The final arrest and expulsion of Jews from Berlin and other large German cities commenced.

The British landed on the island of Herm in the English Channel, but found that it was not occupied.  Because of their landing spot, residents of the island were not aware that their countrymen had landed.

1943  Bishop Count Konrad von Preysing, Catholic Bishop of Berlin, made another in a series of outspoken attacks on Nazi rule. In a pastoral letter issued throughout Germany he protested against totalitarianism, the execution of hostages and the Jewish persecution, stating "It is a Divine principle that the life of an innocent individual, whether an unborn child or an aged person, is sacred, and that the innocent shall not be punished with the guilty, or in place of the guilty. Neither the individual nor the community can create a law against this."  Bishop von Preysing had gone on record early about his opinions on the Nazis, having declared "We have fallen into the hands of criminals and fools" when they came to power, and in 1940 he'd ordered that prayers be said throughout his diocese for arrested Lutheran ministers.  He'd later go on to decry the German Communist postwar who declared that he was an "agent" of "American Imperialism".  He died in 1950.

Coal in Alberta - It Ain't Over Until It's Over!

This is a video by Canadian singer/rancher Corb Lund.

I'm posting it here for an odd reason. This reminds me so much of the view that Wyomingites and Montanans held back in the 70s its not funny.  You'd never guess that now.

Wednesday, November 22, 1922. Unintended Consequences.

 Tampa Bay Times, November 22, 1922.

A mine explosion in Dolomite, Alabama killed 90 people.

Wilhelm Cuno.

Businessman Wilhelm Cuno was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Friedrich Ebert.  It was an appointment, not an elective, commission.

An independent politician, Cuno would serve in the role for less than a year and then retire from politics.  He'd become an economic advisor to Hitler in 1932, which he didn't do long either, given his death in 1933.

Monday, November 6, 1922. Appointment Clerks.

A group of Federal appointment clerks.

This, obviously all male, occupation was exactly what it sounded like.  Clerks who took appointments and handled the same.  Sort of the equivalent of a secretary/receptionist.

As late as the Second World War, in government service this occupation was a male one.  And, as the fine clothing in the photo demonstrates, one that paid a decent living to its occupants.

Indeed, every man here is wearing a three-piece suit of good quality.

Also of note, at least two are smoking cigars, not even taking time out from tobacco consumption to appear without one. When was the last time you were in an office and somebody was smoking a cigar?

A coal mine explosion in Spangler, Pennsylvania, killed 79 miners.

Ali Kemal, age 53, who we mentioned the other day, was lynched on his ways to the gallows by a mob.

By the way, in the long odds category, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a direct descendant of Ali Kemal.  I.e, not a cousin, Kamal is BoJo's Great Grandfather.

Released this day in 1922.

Sunday, August 27, 1922. Horrible Events

A fire at California's Argonaut gold mine killed 47 immigrant men who worked there.  It's the worst mine disaster in California's history.

The fire could not be extinguished.  An exact cause was never determined.

As these photos show, the Red Cross reported to assist at the mine.

Greek Orthodox Bishop Chrysostomos of Smyrna was lynched by a mob after the Turks took the city.  What exactly occurred is not known, but the Bishop, who was a Greek nationalist, refused to evacuate and reported to congratulate the Turks on their victory.  He was horribly murdered and is regarded as a Saint by the Greek Orthodox.

Blog Mirror: Victor, Colorado

 Where my father's mother was born:

Victor, Colorado

Mid Week At Work. November 3, 1921 The birth of Charles Bronson

I don't normally combine these two, but today offers an interesting example of early 20th Century conditions in the form of the centennial of the birth of Charles Bronson.

Bronson as the central figure in Man With A Camera, a television series of the 1950s.

I don't idealize actors the way some people do, and that would include Bronson.  But his early life really provides a glimpse of how things were in "the good old days".  Indeed, of his films, only the short speech in the film The Dirty Dozen about why his character speaks German mirrors his own origins. Bronson spoke, in addition to English, Lithuanian, Russian and Greek, unlike German and Polish like his character in the film.

Bronson was born  Charles Dennis Buchinsky, the eleventh of fifteen children of his parents.  His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who changed the family name to that from. Bučinskis.  His father was actually a Lithuanian Lipka Tatar, many of whom are Muslims.  His parents were however Roman Catholic.

Bronson's family was desperately poor.  His father died when he was ten and he began working in Pennsylvania coal mines at that age.  He nonetheless graduated from high school, being the first member of the family to do so.  He was a full-time miner until 1943, when he joined the Army and entered the Army Air Corps.  He ultimately became a B29 crewman and was wounded in action over Japan.  After the war he returned to Pennsylvanian and worked odd jobs until breaking into acting in the early 1950s.  Unlike many of his acting contemporaries, his wartime service had nothing to do with acting at all.  He was acting in movies by 1951 and had regular television and even leading television roles by the mid 1950s.  His breakthrough star role came with The Magnificent Seven in 1960.

Reviews like this tend to become hagiographies, and I don't intend for that to be the case.  In fact, I don't like most of the Bronson movies from the 1970s, when his star power was at its height.  Interestingly, he broke into full-scale stardom after age 50, which is rare in acting, but a lot of his roles of that period were cartoonish violent exercises.  He was married three times, the first time to aspiring 18 year old actress Harriet Tendler which ended in divorce nearly twenty years later, then to Jill Ireland, and lastly, after her death, to Kim Weeks.  His character in real life always remained hard to get at as he was intensely private and shy, but he was known to hold grudges for protracted periods, seemingly caused, in some people's minds, by lasting surprise that he'd succeeded in movies.

So what, if any, lessons can we draw from this life?

Well, for one thing, while poverty certainly remains in the United States, early childhood stories like Bronson's have gone from common to extremely rare. We don't read about families of fifteen much, and if we do, they tend to more often than not be regarded as interesting oddities, like the now fallen Dugger family.  Bronson's family was big, because it was big, and there's not much else to that.

We also don't see miner works himself to death and then boys begin mining as kids stories either. But at that time, that was common.  Child labor laws were in effect by 1920, but in the coal mining regions of Appalachia, they obviously weren't really enforced.   This is an American story we thankfully don't see much of, even with the very poor, and even with immigrants.

It also demonstrates that even relatively recently an era remained in which people could be intensely private, even secretive.  Surprisingly little is known about Bronson as a person.  Finding out what happened to his fourteen siblings is darned near impossible, other than that they all retained the Buchinsky name.  We know that he was raised in a Catholic family, and his fist father-in-law, who was Jewish, objected to the marriage partially on those grounds, but we don't really know how observant Bronson was, if at all, as an adult.  Indeed, some rumor mills have him as a Lutheran or Russian Orthodox believer, both of which are unlikely.  He clearly wasn't observant in regard to the Catholic views on marriage.  He was a Nixon supporter and his series of early 1970s crime films are of a stout right-wing vigilante character, neither of which tells us more about his deeper views.  We just don't know that much about him.

American success story or American tragedy?  Hard to say.

October 12, 1921. The delegates and the students.

American delegates to Disarmament Conference, 10/12/21

American delegation to disarmament conference,  Root, Underwood, Hughes, Lodge, Mills, 10/12/21

The Mullen's children and neighbors ready for school, October 12, 1921.

Their home.

Their school.

A little log cabin occupied by the F.T. Castle family.

 

Row of Coal miners shanties on Elk River at Bream, W. Va. Location: Bream, West Virginia

The New York Giants beat the Yankees, 2 to 1, in Game 7 of the 1921 World Sereis.

Tuesday, June 10, 1941. Words and Deeds.

The United States contracted to purchase Bolivia's entire production run of tungsten, thereby depriving the Japanese of the same, which was the goal.

Bolivia was the largest supplier of tin to the Allies during World War Two.

Today in World War II History—June 10, 1941

Mussolini delivered a speech in which he stated that the United States was effectively already at war with the Axis powers, which while an exaggeration, had some measure of truth to it, given that the US was clearly acting beyond what strict neutrality would provide for.  He claimed not to be worried and stated that the United Kingdom would fall anyhow.

At this point in time its debated on whether or not Mussolini was aware that Germany was just days away from launching at attack on the Soviet Union.

French  vice premier Darlan delivered a speech in which he warned Frenchmen not to listen to the words of the leaders of the Free French, whom he felt were merely disrupting and disquieting the French.

At this point in time Admiral Darlan, who retained his office in the French navy, was the de facto head of the Vichy government.  He would relinquish that position to Laval the following year.  He was in Algiers when Operation Torch commenced and quickly struck a deal with the Allies which effectively caused the French in North Africa to switch sides.

Darlan has been referred to as a man of "failed destiny" in that he was clearly opposed to the Germans and threatened to take the French navy over to the British during the time of the French collapse.  He was a loyal officer, however, and personally loyal to Petain and therefore collaborated with the Germans in his role as vice premier, at which time he seems to have been resigned to a German victory in Europe.  Personally a republican, when the Allies landed in North Africa his sentiments came back out and he fairly quickly negotiated a French defection to the Allies which would have long lasting as well as immediate consequences.

He wouldn't live to see them as he was assassinated by monarchist Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a member of the resistance, who hadn't forgiven Darlan his Vichy role. 

The ironies, and indeed the tragedy, of Darlan are simply epic.  A believer in the French republican and republican values, he ended up serving in the government that opposed them,  A loyal servant of the French navy, he'd end up essentially leading a coup against Vichy that would in the end cause it to become more of a puppet than it already was and which would lead, in part, to the full German occupation of France.  His most significant opponent after switching sides was DeGaulle, who saw the Free French cause as personally belonging to him, which the republican Darlan did not, and DeGaulle was a monarchist at heart.

The early Fall of the Red Summer. October 31, 1919

On this date, the Red Summer reappeared.

In Corbin Kentucky the summer came in reaction to a stabbing of a local resident two days prior. The victim was white and the the reported assailants black.  In reaction, on this day nearly all of the town's 200 black residents of all ages were forced on to freight cars and made to leave town, depopulating the town of its black residents.  The Town had about 3,600 people (it now has about 7,304, with the population declining in recent years), making the percentage of African American residents appreciable if not large.  Probably around 6% of the population, by my rough math.

The impact has lasted until the present day and the town is nearly all white, with a tiny number of African Americans (.26% of the population) being outnumbered by a tiny number of American Indians (.31%) and Asian Americans .64%).  For the contemporary United States, the town is a real demographic anomaly.

In Butte Montana, while not directly related, police were instructed by Federal authorities to round up for deportation all Mexicans who could not prove citizenship, something not easy to do in 1919 prior to most people carrying any sort of identification.

Butte was a multicultural city due to mining, with a population drawn from all over the world.  Mining itself was headed into strike, and October 1919 was proving to be a bad time to be Hispanic in Butte or Black in Corbin, with no real protection being offered under the law.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Atlantic City, Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Atlantic City, Wyom...:

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Atlantic City, Wyoming

This is St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Atlantic City, Wyoming. The church was built in the then mining town in 1916.

Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (e). What about those other industries?

The shaded stool of Wyoming's other economic sectors.

More economics?

Yep.  We still haven't covered it all.

But then the candidates haven't either, and that's the point.

In the June 24 issue of the Star Tribune there's an article over concerns in the tiny Carbon County town of Rock River about a lack of housing there that threatens to soon become a problem due to an economic boom.

Coal coming back to Carbon County, you might be thinking?

And indeed, the last time southern Carbon County had a boom that's what brought it about.  But that one skipped Rock River.  Rock River last was doing really well a long time ago, although it still did well enough at some point that a relatively new modern school was put in there since the 1970s.

What the anticipated boom in this case would be caused by is an expiration in Federal wind power subsidies which is causing companies that put in wind farms to rush to try to get theirs in, and qualify, before the subsidy expires, which it is likely to do.

Wind turbines have been used for power generation since houses were first wired with electricity.  Indeed, one of the missions of the Rural Electric Administration was to get farmers and ranchers off of windmills in their yards and on to the grid.  Granted, the grid was probably safer than the wind generators of the time, but, none the less.

Now, this isn't an article on wind power.  I've had others on that topic. Rather, this is an article on the topic of "the other" industries that candidates in the election will vaguely reference, but rarely specifically actually address.

It's odd.

In part this doesn't occur as, at least now in the GOP, you just can't say "well. . . oil and gas is doing fine and coal isn't going to get better, so we better look at . . . .".  The official mantra is that coal will recover and oil and gas wouldn't be boom and bust if only the Federal government would stay out of things.  That's naive.

And we know that its naive at that, but we don't want to say too much.  It's sort of based on the power of wishful thinking thesis, but nobody wants to really deal with the decline of coal.

Which is all the odder when we consider that Wyoming at one time had a lot of other extractive industries.  Wyoming was an iron producer, for example, and was well into the second half of the 20th Century.  And Wyoming was a major uranium producer.  All that is no longer the case, due to market forces. Uranium, I'm pretty convinced, will come back.  But you only have to go to Shirley Basin to see that its gone.  There's no town there, where once there was a mining town there.

But there are windmills there, that's for sure.

Wind mill installation has become a big deal in Wyoming. That doesn't mean you could plan an economic future on it, as installation is like petroleum exploration.  It isn't really steady.  It goes in, and then you have the infrastructure.  So, for places like Rock River and Medicine Bow, you have to deal with the boom in construction followed by a bust, but the infrastructure and the jobs associated with it, remain.  And they remain for a very, very, long time.

Now, this post isn't the "why aren't the candidates speaking about wind power" post, although so far they don't seem to be.  It's the "what are those other economic areas" they vaguely reference?

This is probably too broad of category to make a fair post about, frankly, but some attention does need to be given to it. There are a lot of economic activities in Wyoming and we've addressed a lot of them.  But not all by any means. When candidates speak of "improving the economy", what are they talking about.

Some candidates, to be fair, have made specific references to other areas.  Galeotos and Throne have both spoken about technology, although oddly Galeotos was sort of uncharacteristically hostile to the topic in one instances, assuming the Tribune is reporting that accurately, as Throne seemed to get to it first.  Having said that, Throne and Galeotos both have spoken about trying to harness the computerized technological advances of recent years to Wyoming's benefit, and they seem to have some concepts, vague though they may be, about how that would work.

Hageman seems outright hostile to any discussion that doesn't involve 100% application of Wyoming's traditional industries, by which she is pinning her hopes on the extractive industries.  That doesn't seem to show much vision at all, but she's not the only one who likely looks at the economy in that fashion.  If you are in a line of work, and most Wyomingites are not, which is somewhat insulated from booms and busts, that is in fact an attractive way to look at things. . . somewhat.  It has its own problems no matter what, but suffice it to say if you are a small business owner or a laborer, this view really has its problems.

Other candidates simply promise to fix the economy.  Foster Freiss, for example, notes that he's a successful businessman and he can be trusted to fix the economy. Well, being so successful that you can keep a home in Jackson and another in Arizona means something, but what it doesn't mean is that you know anything whatsoever about Wyoming's economy.

And a lot of things go into an economy.  You can't just "fix" them.  Economies are natural in a way (although the corporate capitalist model we have is not a "natural economy" in the pure sense).  That's a big aspect of the economy that the candidates haven't really addressed in a full on way, although some have topically.

As an economic unit, the state, the state has to play to its strengths and attempt to build some where they are lacking.  Some have noted that, and that's particularly noted by people who are strongly reliant on the extractive industries. But it is missing in regards to other things, such as agriculture, in the discussion.

Be that as  it may, there's been little (some, but not much) reference to our weaknesses. Those weaknesses are specifically what the ENDOW study looked at.

There's a lot about Wyoming that makes development of its economy outside of the existing areas its strong in tough.  We lack good transportation and we lack intra state air travel nearly entirely.  We have no passenger rail at all.  Travel during the winter season can be death defying. . . or in fact deadly.

It's also popular to note that we have no major urban areas, but in fact we do.

Wyoming does have a major regional city.  Or actually two such cities.

And those cities are Denver Colorado and Salt Lake City Utah.  Maybe more than that.

Now, that may sound like I'm missing something, but the opposite is true.

Wyoming does have its own culture within the regional culture.  But we have to acknowledge that it is still part of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Northern Plains. And that matters as, at the end of the day, while the states and provinces (did I say provinces, as in Canadian provinces, why yes I did) have their own cultures, their boundaries are not natural ones, for the most part, and therefore they do not have the geographic impact of natural boundaries.  The line separating Wyoming from Colorado, in other words, is not the Rhine River or the Atlas Mountains.  It's just a line.  That line is real in various ways, but you can cross it and never know.

Indeed, as an aside, when a student in Laramie I had a deer license in southern Wyoming and the only really good place I could find to hunt was so near Colorado in those pre GPS days that I constantly worried about crossing into Colorado.  I'm really good with a topographic map, but none the less I worried about it.  Oddly enough, I was hunting in an area where there was a very large stream, a proto river, present and instinctively you found yourself thinking that "across the river is Colorado".  Not so much.

Anyhow, we live in age of increasingly improved transportation and communications. And we live in an age in which economic consolidation has moved towards the cities.  It's been often noted by demographers that, over a long period of time, indeed a period of time exceeding a century, Americans have been leaving rural areas for cities, and leaving towns and small cities for big cities.

Whether this is good or bad is another matter.  Frankly, I feel its nearly universally a negative trend. But it being a negative trend doesn't mean it isn't a trend.  And in our region, that has meant that for much of Wyoming Denver Colorado is the regional hub. For far western Wyoming, that hub is Salt Lake City.  And that's the way it is.

That may be more fine with most Wyomingites than we care to admit (and I'll have more in that in an exciting conclusion to this series) but the truth of the matter is that our major hubs are regional. Denver and Salt Lake City.  If you expand out just a bit, the hubs also include Calgary, St. Paul, Minnesota and Houston Texas.

If you feel otherwise, consider the evidence.  I've worked with and for people in the oil industry who worked in Denver and had bosses in Calgary or Houston.  If you grew up in Wyoming and have an advanced degree, other than in medicine, veterinary medicine, dental medicine, law or accounting there's a really good chance that you moved to Denver, Salt Lake or St. Paul.  Shoot, a lot of Wyomingites end up moving to Denver or Salt Lake simply due to economic reasons, irrespective of their educations.  That includes individuals with nearly no education, and those with advanced degrees.  One friend of mine with an advanced degree grew up outside of Hanna, worked in the mines for awhile, before ended up with what will be a life long career in Denver.  Pretty typical.

And this is the way it is, and we're not changing it.

So, when we speak of those other areas, we have to accept the geographic and economic realities, including that we can't really change a lot of that.

So what are our plans, really?